
THE 
IRON HEEI 



JACK LONDON 



THE IRON HEEL 



BT 
JACK LONDON 

AUTHOR OP " THE CALL OF THE 
* WHITE FANG," ETC. 



NEW YORK 
GROSSET & DUNLAP 

PUBLISHERS 



COPYRIGHT, IWf, 
BT JACK LONDOF. 



Set up and electrotyped. Published February, 1908. Reprinted 
March, September, 1908 ; January, 1909 ; February, May, November, 
1910; October, 1911 ; February, September, 1913; September, 1917. 



StacK 
Annex 



44 At first, this Earth, a stage so gloomed with woe 
You almost sicken at the shifting of the scenes. 
And yet be patient. Our Playwright may show 
la some fifth act what this Wild Drama means.** 



CONTENTS 

PAQB 

FOREWORD .... is 

CHAPTBB 

I. MY EAGLE 1 

^ II. CHALLENGES ......... 22 

III. JOHNSON S ARM 43 

IV. SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 59 

V. THE PHILOMATHS 78 

VI. ADUMBRATIONS 100 

VII. THE BISHOP S VISION Ill 

VHI. THE MACHINE BREAKERS 120 

IX. THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM .... 141 

X. THE VORTEX 163 

XI. THE GREAT ADVENTURE 177 

Xn. THE BISHOP 188 

XIII. THE GENERAL STRIKE 204 

XIV. THE BEGINNING OF THE END . . . . . 217 
XV. LAST DAYS 229 

XVI. THE END 237 

XVII. THE SCARLET LIVERY 251 

XVIII. IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA ..... 262 

XIX. TRANSFORMATION 274 

XX. A LOST OLIGARCH 286 

XXI. THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST 297 

XXII. THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 306 

XXin. THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 324 

XXIV. NIGHTMARE 343 

XXV. THE TERRORISTS 352 

Yii 



FOREWORD 

IT cannot be said that the Everhard Manuscript 
is an important historical document. To the historian 
it bristles with errors not errors of fact, but errors 
of interpretation. Looking back across the seven cen 
turies that have lapsed since Avis Everhard completed 
her manuscript, events, and the bearings of events, 
that were confused and veiled to her, are clear to us. 
She lacked perspective. She was too close to the events 
she writes about. Nay, she was merged in the events 
she has described. 

Nevertheless, as a personal document, the Everhard 
Manuscript is of inestimable value. But here again 
enter error of perspective, and vitiation due to the bias 
of love. Yet we smile, indeed, and forgive Avis Ever- 
hard for the heroic lines upon which she modelled her 
husband. We know to-day that he was not so colossal, 
and that he loomed among the events of his times less 
largely than the Manuscript would lead us to believe. 

We know that Ernest Everhard was an exceptionally 
strong man, but not so exceptional as his wife thought 
him to be. He was, after all, but one of a large number 
of heroes who, throughout the world, devoted their 
lives to the Revolution; though it must be conceded 

ix 



X FOREWORD 

that he did unusual work, especially in his elaboration 
and interpretation of working-class philosophy. "Pro 
letarian science" and "proletarian philosophy" were 
his phrases for it, and therein he shows the provincial 
ism of his mind a defect, however, that was due to 
the times and that none in that day could escape. 

But to return to the Manuscript. Especially valu 
able is it in communicating to us ihefeel of those terrible 
times. Nowhere do we find more vividly portrayed 
the psychology of the persons that lived in that turbu 
lent period embraced between the years 1912 and 1932 
their mistakes and ignorance, their doubts and fears 
and misapprehensions, their ethical delusions, their 
violent passions, their inconceivable sordidness and self 
ishness. These are the things that are so hard for us 
of this enlightened age to understand. History tells 
us that these things were, and biology and psychology 
tell us why they were ; but history and biology and psy 
chology do not make these things alive. We accept 
them as facts, but we are left without sympathetic 
comprehension of them. 

This sympathy comes to us, however, as we peruse 
the Everhard Manuscript. We enter into the minds of 
the actors in that long-ago world-drama, and for the 
time being their mental processes are our mental pro 
cesses. Not alone do we understand Avis Everhard s 
love for her hero-husband, but we feel, as he felt, 
in those first days, the vague and terrible loom of the 



FOREWORD xi 

Oligarchy. The Iron Heel (well named) we feel de 
scending upon and crushing mankind. 

And in passing we note that that historic phrase, 
the Iron Heel, originated in Ernest Everhard s mind. 
This, we may say, is the one moot question that this 
new-found document clears up. Previous to this, the 
earliest-known use of the phrase occurred in the pam 
phlet, "Ye Slaves," written by George Milford and 
published in December, 1912. This George Milford 
was an obscure agitator about whom nothing is known, 
save the one additional bit of information gained from, 
the Manuscript, which mentions that he was shot in the 
Chicago Commune. Evidently he had heard Ernest 
Everhard make use of the phrase in some public speech, 
most probably when he was running for Congress in the 
fall of 1912. From the Manuscript we learn that Ever" 
hard used the phrase at a private dinner in the spring 
of 1912. This is, without discussion, the earliest-known 
occasion on which the Oligarchy was so designated. 

The rise of the Oligarchy will always remain a cause 
of secret wonder to the historian and the philosopher. 
Other great historical events have their place in social 
evolution. They were inevitable. Their coming could 
have been predicted with the same certitude that as 
tronomers to-day predict the outcome of the move 
ments of stars. Without these other great historical 
events, social evolution could not have proceeded. 
Primitive communism, chattel slavery, serf slavery, 



xii FOREWORD 

and wage slavery were necessary stepping-stones in the 
evolution of society. But it were ridiculous to assert 
that the Iron Heel was a necessary stepping-stone. 
Rather, to-day, is it adjudged a step aside, or a step 
backward, to the social tyrannies that made the early 
world a hell, but that were as necessary as the Iron Heel 
was unnecessary. 

Black as Feudalism was, yet the coming of it was 
inevitable. What else than Feudalism could have fol 
lowed upon the breakdown of that great centralized 
governmental machine known as the Roman Empire? 
Not so, however, with the Iron Heel. In the orderly 
procedure of social evolution there was no place for it. 
It was not necessary, and it was not inevitable. It 
must always remain the great curiosity of history a 
whim, a fantasy, an apparition, a thing unexpected and 
undreamed ; and it should serve as a warning to those 
rash political theorists of to-day who speak with cer 
titude of social processes. 

Capitalism was adjudged by the sociologists of the 
time to be the culmination of bourgeois rule, the ripened 
fruit of the bourgeois revolution. And we of to-day 
can but applaud that judgment. Following upon 
Capitalism, it was held, even by such intellectual and 
antagonistic giants as Herbert Spencer, that Socialism 
would come. Out of the decay of self-seeking capital 
ism, it was held, would arise that flower of the ages, 
the Brotherhood of Man. Instead of which, appalling 



FOREWORD xiii 

alike to us who look back and to those that lived at the 
time, capitalism, rotten-ripe, sent forth that monstrous 
offshoot, the Oligarchy. 

Too late did the socialist movement of the early 
twentieth century divine the coming of the Oligarchy. 
Even as it was divined, the Oligarchy was there a fact 
established in blood, a stupendous and awful reality. 
Nor even then, as the Everhard Manuscript well shows, 
was any permanence attributed to the Iron Heel. Its 
overthrow was a matter of a few short years, was the 
judgment of the revolutionists. It is true, they realized 
that the Peasant Revolt was unplanned, and that the 
First Revolt was premature; but they little realized 
that the Second Revolt, planned and mature, was 
doomed to equal futility and more terrible punishment. 

It is apparent that Avis Everhard completed the 
Manuscript during the last days of preparation for the 
Second Revolt ; hence the fact that there is no mention 
; of the disastrous outcome of the Second Revolt. It is 
quite clear that she intended the Manuscript for imme 
diate publication, as soon as the Iron Heel was over 
thrown, so that her husband, so recently dead, should 
receive full credit for all that he had ventured and ac 
complished. Then came the frightful crushing of the 
Second Revolt, and it is probable that in the moment of 
danger, ere she fled or was captured by the Mercenaries, 
she hid the Manuscript in the hollow oak at Wake 
Robin Lodge. 



xiv FOREWORD 

Of Avis Everhard there is no further record. Un 
doubtedly she was executed by the Mercenaries ; and, 
as is well known, no record of such executions was kept 
by the Iron Heel. But little did she realize, even then, 
as she hid the Manuscript and prepared to flee, how 
terrible had been the breakdown of the Second Revolt. 
Little did she realize that the tortuous and distorted 
evolution of the next three centuries would compel a 
Third Revolt and a Fourth Revolt, and many Revolts, 
all drowned in seas of blood, ere the world-movement 
of labor should come into its own. And little did she 
dream that for seven long centuries the tribute of her 
love to Ernest Everhard would repose undisturbed in 
the heart of the ancient oak at Wake Robin Lodge. 

ANTHONY MEREDITH. 

ARDIS, 

November 27, 419 B.O.M. 



THE IRON HEEL 



THE IRON HEEL 



CHAPTER I 

MY EAGLE 

T&E soft summer wind stirs the redwoods, and Wild- 
Water ripples sweet cadences over its mossy stones. 
There are butterflies in the sunshine, and from every 
where arises the drowsy hum of bees. It is so quiet 
and peaceful, and I sit here, and ponder, and am rest 
less. It is the quiet that makes me restless. It seems 
unreal. All the world is quiet, but it is the quiet before 
the storm. I strain my ears, and all my senses, for 
some betrayal of that impending storm. Oh, that it 
may not be premature ! That it may not be premature ! * 

Small wonder that I am restless. I think, and think, 
and I cannot cease from thinking. I have been in the 
thick of life so long that I am oppressed by the peace and 
quiet, and I cannot forbear from dwelling upon that 

1 The Second Revolt was largely the work of Ernest Everhard, 
though he cooperated, of course, with the European leaders. The 
capture and secret execution of Everhard was the great event of the 
spring of 1932 A.D. Yet so thoroughly had he prepared for the re 
volt, that his fellow-conspirators were able, with little confusion or 
delay, to carry out his plans. It was after Everhard s execution that 
his wife went to Wake Robin Lodge, a small bungalow in the Sonoma 
of California. 

B 1 



4 THE IRON HEEL 

devotion to the Cause for which, only two months gone, 
he laid down his life. 

I shall try to write simply and to tell here how Ernest 

Everhard entered my life how I first met him, how 

he grew until I became a part of him, and the tre- 

mendous changes he wrought in my life. In this way 

may you look at him through my eyes and learn him 

as I learned him in all save the things too secret 

and sweet for me to tell. 

It was in February, 1912, that I first met him, when, 
as a guest of my father s 1 at dinner, he came to our 
house in Berkeley. I cannot say that my very first 
impression of him was favorable. He was one of many 
at dinner, and in the drawing-room where we gathered 
and waited for all to arrive, he made a rather incongru 
ous appearance. It was "preacher s night," as my 
father privately called it, and Ernest was certainly out 
of place in the midst of the churchmen. 

In the first place, his clothes did not fit him. He 
wore a ready-made suit of dark cloth that was ill 
adjusted to his body. In fact, no ready-made suit of 

1 John Cunningham, Avis Everhard s father, was a professor at the 
State University at Berkeley, California. His chosen field was phys 
ics, and in addition he did much original research and was greatly 
distinguished as a scientist. His chief contribution to science was his 
studies of the electron and his monumental work on the " Identifica 
tion of Matter and Energy," wherein he established, beyond cavil 
and for all time, that the ultimate unit of matter and the ultimate unit 
of force were identical. This idea had been earlier advanced, but not 
demonstrated, by Sir Oliver Lodge and other students in the new 
field of radio-activity. 



MY EAGLE 5 

clothes ever could fit his body. And on this night, as 
always, the cloth bulged with his muscles, while the 
coat between the shoulders, what of the heavy shoulder- 
development, was a maze of wrinkles. His neck v. 7 as 
the neck of a prize-fighter, 1 thick and strong. So this 
was the social philosopher and ex-horseshoer my father 
had discovered, was my thought. And he certainly 
looked it with those bulging muscles and that bull- 
throa^. Immediately I classified him a sort of 
prodigy, I thought, a Blind Tom 2 of the working class. 

And then, when he shook hands with me ! His hand 
shake was firm and strong, but he looked at me boldly 
with his black eyes too boldly, I thought. You see, 
I was a creature of environment, and at that time had 
strong class instincts. Such boldness on the part of a 
man of my own class would have been almost unfor 
givable. I know that I could not avoid dropping my 
eyes, and I was quite relieved when I passed him on 
and turned to greet Bishop Morehouse a favorite of 
mine, a sweet and serious man of middle age, Christ- 
like in appearance and goodness, and a scholar as 
well. 

But this boldness that I took to be presumption was 
a vital clew to the nature of Ernest Everhard. He was 

1 In that day it was the custom of men to compete for purses of 
money. They fought with their hands. When one was beaten into 
insensibility or killed, the survivor took the money. 

2 This obscure reference applies to a blind negro musician who 
took the world by storm in the latter half of the nineteenth century 
of the Christian Era. 



8 THE IRON HEEL 

Your sociology is as vicious and worthless as is your 
method of thinking." 

It was not so much what he said as how he said it. 
I roused at the first sound of his voice. It was as bold 
as his eyes. It was a clarion-call that thrilled me. 
And the whole table was aroused, shaken alive from 
monotony and drowsiness. 

"What is so dreadfully vicious and worthless in our 
method of thinking, young man?" Dr. Hammerfield 
demanded, and already there was something unpleasant 
in his voice and manner of utterance. 

"You are metaphysicians. You can prove any 
thing by metaphysics; and having done so, every 
metaphysician can prove every other metaphysician 
wrong --to his own satisfaction. You are anar 
chists in the realm of thought. And you are mad 
cosmos-makers. Each of you dwells in a cosmos of 
his own making, created out of his own fancies and 
desires. You do not know the real world in which 
you live, and your thinking has no place in the real 
world except in so far as it is phenomena of mental 
aberration. 

"Do you know what I was reminded of as I 
sat at table and listened to you talk and talk? 
You reminded me for all the world of the scholas 
tics of the Middle Ages who gravely and learnedly 
debated the absorbing question of how many angels 
could dance on the point of a needle. Why, my dear 



MY EAGLE 9 

sirs, you are as remote from the intellectual life of 
the twentieth century as an Indian medicine-man 
making incantation in the primeval forest ten thou 
sand years ago." 

As Ernest talked he seemed in a fine passion; his 
face glowed, his eyes snapped and flashed, and his 
chin and jaw were eloquent with aggressiveness. But 
it was only a way he had. It always aroused people. 
His smashing, sledge-hammer manner of attack in 
variably made them forget themselves. And they 
were forgetting themselves now. Bishop Morehouse 
was leaning forward and listening intently. Exas 
peration and anger were flushing the face of Dr. 
Hammerfield. And others were exasperated, too, and 
some were smiling in an amused and superior way. 
As for myself, I found it most enjoyable. I glanced at 
father, and I was afraid he was going to giggle at the 
effect of this human bombshell he had been guilty of 
launching amongst us. 

"Your terms are rather vague," Dr. Hammerfield 
interrupted. "Just precisely what do you mean when 
you call us metaphysicians?" 

" I call you metaphysicians because you reason meta 
physically," Ernest went on. "Your method of 
reasoning is the opposite to that of science. There is 
no validity to your conclusions. You can prove every 
thing and nothing, and no two of you can agree upon 
anything. Each of you goes into his own consciousness 



10 THE IRON HEEL 

to explain himself and the universe. As well may 
you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to explain 
consciousness by consciousness." 

"I do not understand," Bishop Morehouse said. 
"It seems to me that all things of the mind are meta 
physical. That most exact and convincing of all 
sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each 
and every thought-process of the scientific reasoner is 
metaphysical. Surely you will agree with me?" 

"As you say, you do not understand," Ernest replied. 
"The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his 
own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively 
from the facts of experience. The metaphysician rea 
sons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from 
facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the uni- 
veise by himself, the scientist explains himself by the 
universe." 

"Thank God we are not scientists," Dr. Hammer- 
field murmured complacently. 

"What are you then?" Ernest demanded. 

"Philosophers." 

"There you go," Ernest laughed. "You have left 
the real and solid earth and are up in the air with a 
word for a flying machine. Pray come down to earth 
and tell me precisely what you do mean by philosophy." 

"Philosophy is- (Dr. Hammerfield paused and 
cleared his throat) "something that cannot be 
defined comprehensively except to such minds and 



MY EAGLE 11 

temperaments as are philosophical. The narrow scien 
tist with his nose in a test-tube cannot understand 
philosophy." 

Ernest ignored the thrust. It was always his way 
to turn the point back upon an opponent, and he did it 
now, with a beaming brotherliness of face and utter 
ance. 

"^hen you will undoubtedly understand the defini 
tion I shall now make of philosophy. But before I 
make it, I shall challenge you to point out error in 
it or to remain a silent metaphysician. Philosophy 
is merely the widest science of all. Its reasoning 
method is the same as that of any particular science 
and of all particular sciences. And by that s.^me 
method of reasoning, the inductive method, philosophy 
fuses all particular sciences into one great science. As 
Spencer says, the data of any particular science are 
partially unified knowledge. Philosophy unifies the 
knowledge that is contributed by a?l the sciences. 
Philosophy is the science of science, the master science, 
if you please. How do you like my definition?" 

"Very creditable, very creditable," Dr. Hammerfield 
muttered lamely. 

But Ernest was merciless. 

"Remember," he warned, "my definition is fatal 
to metaphysics. If you clo not now point out a flaw 
in my definition, you are disqualified later on from, 
advancing metaphysical arguments. You must go 



10 THE IRON HEEL 

to explain himself and the universe. As well may 
you lift yourselves by your own bootstraps as to explain 
consciousness by consciousness." 

"I do not understand," Bishop Morehouse said. 
"It seems to me that all things of the mind are meta 
physical. That most exact and convincing of all 
sciences, mathematics, is sheerly metaphysical. Each 
and every thought-process of the scientific reasoner is 
metaphysical. Surely you will agree with me?" 

"As you say, you do not understand," Ernest replied. 
"The metaphysician reasons deductively out of his 
own subjectivity. The scientist reasons inductively 
from the facts of experience. The metaphysician rea 
sons from theory to facts, the scientist reasons from 
facts to theory. The metaphysician explains the uni- 
veise by himself, the scientist explains himself by the 
universe." 

"Thank God we are not scientists," Dr. Hammer- 
field murmured complacently. 

"What are you then?" Ernest demanded. 

"Philosophers." 

"There you go," Ernest laughed. "You have left 
the real and solid earth and are up in the air with a 
word for a flying machine. Pray come down to earth 
and tell me precisely what you do mean by philosophy." 

"Philosophy is (Dr. Hammerfield paused and 
cleared his throat) "something that cannot be 
defined comprehensively except to such minds and 



MY EAGLE 11 

temperaments as are philosophical. The narrow scien 
tist with his nose in a test-tube cannot understand 
philosophy." 

Ernest ignored the thrust. It was always his way 
to turn the point back upon an opponent, and he did. it 
now, with a beaming brotherliness of face and utter 
ance. 

" Then you will undoubtedly understand the defini 
tion I shall now make of philosophy. But before I 
make it, I shall challenge you to point out error in 
it or to remain a silent metaphysician. Philosophy 
is merely the widest science of all. Its reasoning 
method is the same as that of any particular science 
and of all particular sciences. And by that s;me 
method of reasoning, the inductive method, philosophy 
fuses all particular sciences into one great science. As 
Spencer says, the data of any particular science are 
partially unified knowledge. Philosophy unifies the 
knowledge that is contributed by a.l the sciences. 
Philosophy is the science of science, the master science, 
if you please. How do you like my definition ? " 

"Very creditable, very creditable," Dr. Hammerfield 
muttered lamely. 

But Ernest was merciless. 

"Remember," he warned, "my definition is fatal 
to metaphysics. If you do not now point out a flaw 
in my definition, you are disqualified later on from, 
advancing metaphysical arguments. You must go 



12 THE IRON HEEL 

through life seeking that flaw and remaining meta 
physically silent until you have found it." 

Ernest waited. The silence was painful. Dr. Ham- 
merfield was pained. He was also puzzled. Ernest s 
sledge-hammer attack disconcerted him. He was not 
used to the simple and direct method of controversy. 
He looked appealingly around the table, but no one an 
swered for him. I caught father grinning into his napkin. 

"There is another way of disqualifying the metaphysi 
cians," Ernest said, when he had rendered Dr. Hammer- 
field s discomfiture complete. "Judge them by their 
works. What have they done for mankind beyond the 
spinning of airy fancies and the mistaking of their own 
shadows for gods ? They have added to the gayety of 
mankind, I grant; but what tangible good have they 
wrought for mankind ? They philosophized, if you will 
pardon my misuse of the word, about the heart as the 
seat of the emotions, while the scientists were formu 
lating the circulation of the blood. They declaimed 
about famine and pestilence as being scourges of God, 
while the scientists were building granaries and drain 
ing cities. They builded gods in their own shapes and 
out of their own desires, while the scientists were 
building roads and bridges. They were describing the 
earth as the centre of the universe, while the scientists 
were discovering America and probing space for the 
stars and the laws of the stars. In short, the meta 
physicians have done nothing, absolutely nothing, for 



MY EAGLE 13 

mankind. Step by step, before the advance of science, 
they have been driven back. As fast as the ascertained 
facts of science have overthrown their subjective expla 
nations of things, they have made new subjective ex 
planations of things, including explanations of the latest 
ascertained facts. And this, I doubt not, they will go 
on doing to the end qf time. Gentlemen, a metaphysi- 
ciaji is a medicine man. The difference between you 
and the Eskimo who makes a fur-clad blubber-eating 
god is merely a difference of several thousand years of 
ascertained facts. That is all." 

"Yet the thought of Aristotle ruled Europe for 
twelve centuries," Dr. Ballingford announced pom 
pously. "And Aristotle was a metaphysician." 

Dr. Ballingford glanced around the table and was 
rewarded by nods and smiles of approval. 

"Your illustration is most unfortunate," Ernest 
replied. "You refer to a very dark period in human 
history. In fact, we call that period the Dark Ages. 
A period wherein science was raped by the metaphysi 
cians, wherein physics became a search for the Philoso 
pher s Stone, wherein chemistry became alchemy, and 
astronomy became astrology. Sorry the domination 
of Aristotle s thought!" 

Dr. Ballingford looked pained, then he brightened 
up and said : 

"Granted this horrible picture you have drawn, yet 
you must confess that metaphysics was inherently po- 



14 THE I110N HEEL 

tent in so far as it drew humanity out of this dark period 
and on into the illumination of the succeeding cen 
turies." 

"Metaphysics had nothing to do with it," Ernest 
retorted. 

" What?" Dr. Hammerfield cried. "It was not the 
thinking and the speculation that led to the voyages of 
discovery?" 

"Ah, my dear sir," Ernest smiled, "I thought you 
were disqualified. You have not yet picked out the 
flaw in my definition of philosophy. You are now on an 
unsubstantial basis. But it is the way of the meta 
physicians, and I forgive you. No, I repeat, meta 
physics had nothing to do with it. Bread and butter, 
silks and jewels, dollars and cents, and, incidentally, 
the closing up of the overland trade-routes to India, 
were the things that caused the voyages of di-^^very. 
With the fall of Constantinople, in 1453, the Turks 
blocked the way of the caravans to India. The traders 
of Europe had to find another route. Here was the 
original cause for the voyages of discovery. Columbus 
sailed to find a new route to the Indies. It is so slated 
in all the history books. Incidentally, new facts were 
learned about the nature, size, and form of the earth, 
and the Ptolemaic system went glimmering." 

Dr. Hammerfield snorted. 

"You do not agree with me?" Ernest queried. 
Then wherein am I wrong?" 



MY EAGLE 15 

"I can only reaffirm my position," Dr. Hammerfield 
retorted tartly. "It is too long a story to enter into 
now." 

"No story is too long for the scientist," Ernest said 
sweetly. "That is why the scientist gets to places. 
That is why he got to America." 

I shall not describe the whole evening, though it is 
a joy to me to recall every moment, every detail, of 
thosfe first hours of my coming to know Ernest Ever- 
hard. 

Battle royal raged, and the ministers grew red-faced 
and excited, especially at the moments when Ernest 
called them romantic philosophers, shadow-projectors, 
and similar things. And always he checked them back 
to facts. " The fact, man, the irrefragable fact!" 
he would proclaim triumphantly, when he had brought 
one of them a cropper. He bristled with facts. He 
tripped them up with facts, ambuscaded them with 
facts, bombarded them with broadsides of facts. 

"You seem to worship at the shrine of fact," Dr. 
Hammerfield taunted him. 

"There is no God but Fact, and Mr. Everhard is its 
prophet," Dr. Ballingford paraphrased. 

Ernest smilingly acquiesced. 

"I m like the man from Texas," he said. And, on 
being solicited, he explained. "You see, the man from 
Missouri always says, You ve got to show me. But 
the man from Texas says, l You ve got to put it in my 



16 THE IRON HEEL 

hand. From which it is apparent that he is no meta 
physician." 

Another time, when Ernest had just said that the 
metaphysical philosophers could never stand the test of 
truth, Dr. Hammerfield suddenly demanded: 

"What is the test of truth, young man? Will you 
kindly explain what has so long puzzled wiser heads 
than yours?" 

"Certainly," Ernest answered. His cocksureness 
irritated them. "The wise heads have puzzled so 
sorely over truth because they went up into the air 
after it. Had they remained on the solid earth, they 
would have found it easily enough ay, they would 
have found that they themselves were precisely testing 
truth with every practical act and thought of their 
lives." 

"The test, the test," Dr. Hammerfield repeated 
impatiently. "Never mind the preamble. Give us 
that which we have sought so long the test of truth. , 
Give it us, and we will be as gods." 

There was an impolite and sneering scepticism in his 
words and manner that secretly pleased most of them 
at the table, though it seemed to bother Bishop More- 
house. 

"Dr. Jordan l has stated it very clearly," Ernest said. 

1 A noted educator of the late nineteenth and early twentieth cen 
turies of the Christian Era. He was president of the Stanford Uni 
versity, a private benefaction of the times. 



MY EAGLE 17 

"His test of truth is: Will it work? Will you trust 
your life to it? " 

"Pish !" Dr. Hammerfield sneered. "You have not 
taken Bishop Berkeley l into account. He has never 
been answered." 

"The noblest metaphysician of them all," Ernest 
laughed. "But your example is unfortunate. As 
Berkeley himself attested, his metaphysics didn t work." 

Dr. Hammerfield was angry, righteously angry. It 
was as though he had caught Ernest in a theft or a lie. 

"Young man," he trumpeted, "that statement is 
on a par with all you have uttered to-night. It is a 
base and unwarranted assumption." 

"I am quite crushed," Ernest murmured meekly. 
"Only I don t know what hit me. You ll have to put 
it in my hand, Doctor." 

"I will, I will," Dr. Hammerfield spluttered. "How 
do you know ? You do not know that Bishop Berkeley 
attested that his metaphysics did not work. You have 
no proof. Young man, they have always worked." 

"I take it as proof that Berkeley s metaphysics did 
not work, because Ernest paused calmly for a 
moment. "Because Berkeley made an invariable prac 
tice of going through doors instead of walls. Because 
he trusted his life to solid bread and butter and roast 

1 An idealistic monist who long puzzled the philosophers of that 
time with his denial of the existence of matter, but whose clever ar 
gument was finally demolished when the new empiric facts of science 
Were philosophically generalized. 
c 



18 THE IRON HEEL 

beef. Because he shaved himself with a razor that 
worked when it removed the hair from his face." 

"But those are actual things!" Dr. Hammerfield 
cried. " Metaphysics is of the mind." 

"And they work in the mind?" Ernest queried 
softly. 

The other nodded. 

"And even a multitude of angels can dance on the 
point of a needle in the mind," Ernest went on 
reflectively. "And a blubber-eating, fur-clad god 
can exist and work in the mind ; and there are no 
proofs to the contrary in the mind. I suppose, 
Doctor, you live in the mind?" 

"My mind to me a kingdom is," was the answer. 

"That s another way of saying that you live up in the 
air. But you come back to earth at meal-time, 1 am 
sure, or when an earthquake happens along. Or, tell 
me, Doctor, do you have no apprehension in an earth 
quake that that incorporeal body of yours will be hit 
by an immaterial brick?" 

Instantly, and quite unconsciously, Dr. Hammer- 
field s hand shot up to his head, where a scar disap 
peared under the hair. It happened that Ernest had 
blundered on an apposite illustration. Dr. Hammer- 
field had been nearly killed in the Great Earthquake 1 
by a falling chimney. Everybody broke out into roars 
of laughter. 

1 The Great Earthquake of 1906 A. D. that destroyed San Francisco. 



MY EAGLE 19 

"Well?" Ernest asked, when the merriment had 
subsided. "Proofs to the contrary?" 

And in the silence he asked again, "Well?" Then 
he added, "Still well, but not so well, that argument 
of yours." 

But Dr. Hammerfield was temporarily crushed, and 
the battle raged on in new directions. On point after 
po,int, Ernest challenged the ministers. When they 
affirmed that they knew the working class, he told 
them fundamental truths about the working class that 
they did not know, and challenged them for disproofs. 
He gave them facts, always facts, checked their excur 
sions into the air, and brought them back to the solid 
earth and its facts. 

How the scene comes back to me ! I can hear him 
now, with that war-note in his voice, flaying them with 
his facts, each fact a lash that stung and stung again. 
And he was merciless. He took no quarter, 1 and gave 
none. I can never forget the flaying he gave them at 
the end : 

"You have repeatedly confessed to-night, by direct 
avowal or ignorant statement, that you do not know 
the working class. But you are not to be blamed for 
this. How can you know anything about the working 
class? You do not live in the same locality with the 

1 This figure arises from the customs of the times. When, among 
men fighting to the death in their wild-animal way, a beaten man threw 
down his weapons, it was at the option of the victor to slay him or 
spare him. 



20 THE IRON HEEL 

working class. You herd with the capitalist class in 
another locality. And why not? It is the capitalist 
class that pays you, that feeds you, that puts the very 
clothes on your backs that you are wearing here to 
night. And in return you preach to your employers 
the brands of metaphysics that are especially acceptable 
to them; and the especially acceptable brands are 
acceptable because they do not menace the established 
order of society." 

Here there was a stir of dissent around the table. 

"Oh, I am not challenging your sincerity," Ernest 
continued. "You are sincere. You preach what you 
believe. There lies your strength and your value - 
to the capitalist class. But should you change your 
belief to something that menaces the established order, 
your preaching would be unacceptable to your em 
ployers, and you would be discharged. Every little 
while some one or another of you is so discharged. 1 
Ami not right?" 

This time there was no dissent. They sat dumbly 
acquiescent, with the exception of Dr. Hammerfield, 
who said : 

"It is when their thinking is wrong that they are 
asked to resign." 

"Which is another way of saying when their think- 



1 During this period there were many ministers cast out of the 
church for preaching unacceptable doctrine. Especially were they 
cast out when their preaching became tainted with socialism. 



MY EAGLE 21 

ing is unacceptable," Ernest answered, and then went 
on. "So I say to you, go ahead and preach and earn 
your pay, but for goodness sake leave the working class 
alone. You belong in the enemy s camp. You have 
nothing in common with the working class. Your 
hands are soft with the work others have performed 
for you. Your stomachs are round with the plenitude 
of Beating." (Here Dr. Ballingford winced, and every 
eye glanced at his prodigious girth. It was said he had 
not seen his own feet in years.) "And your minds 
are filled with doctrines that are buttresses of the 
established order. You are as much mercenaries 
(sincere mercenaries, I grant) as were the men of the 
Swiss Guard. 1 Be true to your salt and your hire; 
guard, with your preaching, the interests of your 
employers ; but do not come down to the working class 
and serve as false leaders. You cannot honestly be in 
the two camps at once. The working class has done 
without you. Believe me, the working class will con 
tinue to do without you. And, furthermore, the work 
ing class can do better without you than with you." 

1 The hired foreign palace guards of Louis XVI., a king of France 
that was beheaded by his people. 



CHAPTER II 

CHALLENGES 

AFTER the guests had gone, father threw himself 
into a chair and gave vent to roars of Gargantuan 
laughter. Not since the death of my mother had I 
known him to laugh so heartily. 

"I ll wager Dr. Hammerfield was never up against 
anything like it in his life," he laughed. " The cour 
tesies of ecclesiastical controversy ! Did you notice 
how he began like a lamb Everhard, I mean, and 
how quickly he became a roaring lion? He has a 
splendidly disciplined mind. He would have made a 
good scientist if his energies had been directed that 
way." 

I need scarcely say that I was deeply interested in 
Ernest Everhard. It was not alone what he had said 
and how he had said it ; but it was the man himself. I 
had never met a man like him. I suppose that was 
why, in spite of my twenty-four years, I had not 
married. I liked him ; I had to confess it to myself. 
And my like for him was founded on things beyond 
intellect and argument. Regardless of his bulging; 

22 



CHALLENGES 23 

muscles and prize-fighter s throat, he impressed me as 
an ingenuous boy. I felt that under the guise of an 
intellectual swashbuckler was a delicate and sensitive 
spirit. I sensed this, in ways I knew not, save that 
they were my woman s intuitions. 

There was something in that clarion-call of his that 
went to my heart. It still rang in my ears, and I felt 
that I should like to hear it again and to see again 
that glint of laughter in his eyes that belied the im 
passioned seriousness of his face. And there were 
further reaches of vague and indeterminate feelings 
that stirred in me. I almost loved him then, though 
I am confident, had I never seen him again, that the 
vague feelings would have passed away and that I 
should easily have forgotten him. 

But I was not destined never to see him again. My 
father s new-born interest in sociology and the dinner 
parties he gave would not permit. Father was not a 
sociologist. His marriage with my mother had been 
very happy, and in the researches of his own science, 
physics, he had been very happy. But when mother 
died, his own work could not fill the emptiness. At first, 
in a mild way, he had dabbled in philosophy; then, 
becoming interested, he had drifted on into economics 
and sociology. He had a strong sense of justice, and 
he soon became fired with a passion to redress wrong. 
It was with gratitude that I hailed these signs of a new 
interest in life, though I little dreamed what the out- 



24 THE IRON HEEL 

come would be. With the enthusiasm of a boy he 
plunged excitedly into these new pursuits, regardless 
of whither they led him. 

He had been used always to the laboratory, and so 
it was that he turned the dining room into a socio 
logical laboratory. Here came to dinner all sorts and 
conditions of men, scientists, politicians, bankers, 
merchants, professors, labor leaders, socialists, and 
anarchists. He stirred them to discussion, and ana 
lyzed their thoughts on life and society. 

He had met Ernest shortly prior to the "preacher s 
night." And after the guests were gone, I learned how 
he had met him, passing down a street at night and 
stopping to listen to a man on a soap-box who was 
addressing a crowd of workingmen. The man on the 
box was Ernest. Not that he was a mere soap-box 
orator. He stood high in the councils of the socialist 
party, was one of the leaders, and was the acknowledged 
leader in the philosophy of socialism. But he had a 
certain clear way of stating the abstruse in simple 
language, was a born expositor and teacher, and was 
not above the soap-box as a means of interpreting 
economics to the workingmen. 

My father stopped to listen, became interested, 
effected a meeting, and, after quite an acquaintance, 
invited him to the ministers dinner. It was after the 
dinner that father told me what little he knew about 
him. He had been born in the working class, though 



CHALLENGES 25 

he was a descendant of the old line of Everhards that 
for over two hundred years had lived in America. 1 
At ten years of age he had gone to work in the mills, 
and later he served his apprenticeship and became a 
horseshoer. He was self-educated, had taught him 
self German and French, and at that time was earning 
a meagre living by translating scientific and philosophi 
cal works for a struggling socialist publishing house in 
Chicago. Also, his earnings were added to by the 
royalties from the small sales of his own economic and 
philosophic works. 

This much I learned of him before I went to bed, and 
I lay long awake, listening in memory to the sound of 
his voice. I grew frightened at my thoughts. He was 
so unlike the men of my own class, so alien and so 
strong. His masterfulness delighted me and terrified 
me, for my fancies wantonly roved until I found my 
self considering him as a lover, as a husband. I had 
always heard that the strength of men was an irresist 
ible attraction to women ; but he was too strong. "No ! 
no!" I cried out. "It is impossible, absurd!" And 
on the morrow I awoke to find in myself a longing to 
see him again. I wanted to see him mastering men in 
discussion, the war-note in his voice ; to see him, in 
all his certitude and strength, shattering their com 
placency, shaking them out of their ruts of thinking. 

1 The distinction between being native born and foreign born was 
sharp and invidious in those days. 



26 THE IRON HEEL 

What if he did swashbuckle ? To use his own phrase, 
"it worked," it produced effects. And, besides, his 
swashbuckling was a fine thing to see. It stirred one 
like the onset of battle. 

Several days passed during which I read Ernest s 
books, borrowed from my father. His written word 
was as his spoken word, clear and convincing. It was 
its absolute simplicity that convinced even while one 
continued to doubt. He had the gift of lucidity. He 
was the perfect expositor. Yet, in spite of his style, 
there was much that I did not like. He laid too great 
stress on what he called the class struggle, the antago 
nism between labor and capital, the conflict of interest. 

Father reported with glee Dr. Hammerfield s judg 
ment of Ernest, which was to the effect that he was 
"an insolent young puppy, made bumptious by a little 
and very inadequate learning." Also, Dr. Hammer- 
field declined to meet Ernest again. 

But Bishop Morehouse turned out to have become 
interested in Ernest, and was anxious for another 
meeting. "A strong young man," he said; "and 
very much alive, very much alive. But he is too sure, 
too sure." 

Ernest came one afternoon with father. The Bishop 
had already arrived, and we were having tea on the 
veranda. Ernest s continued presence in Berkeley, 
by the way, was accounted for by the fact that he was 
taking special courses in biology at the university, and 



CHALLENGES 27 

also that he was hard at work on a new book entitled 
" Philosophy and Revolution." 

The veranda seemed suddenly to have become small 
when Ernest arrived. Not that he was so very large 
he stood only five feet nine inches ; but that he 
seemed to radiate an atmospnere of largeness. As he 
stopped to meet me, he betrayed a certain slight awk- 
wardaess that was strangely at variance with his bold- 
looking eyes and his firm, sure hand that clasped for a 
moment in greeting. And in that moment his eyes 
were just as steady and sure. There seemed a question 
in them this time, and as before he looked at me over 
long. 

"I have been reading your Working-class Philoso 
phy, " I said, and his eyes lighted in a pleased way. 

"Of course," he answered, "you took into considera 
tion the audience to which it was addressed." 

"I did, and it is because I did that I have a quarrel 
with you," I challenged. 

"I, too, have a quarrel with you, Mr. Everhard," 
Bishop Morehouse said. 

Ernest shrugged his shoulders whimsically and ac 
cepted a cup of tea. 

The Bishop bowed and gave me precedence. 

"You foment class hatred," I said. "I consider it 



1 This book continued to be secretly printed throughout the three 
centuries of the Iron Heel. There are several copies of various editions 
in the National Library of Ardis. 



28 THE IRON HEEL 

wrong and criminal to appeal to all that is narrow and 
brutal in the working class. Class hatred is anti-social, 
and, it seems to me, anti-socialistic." 

"Not guilty," he answered. "Class hatred is neither 
in the text nor in the spirit of anything I have ever 
written." 

"Oh!" I cried reproachfully, and reached for his 
book and opened it. 

He sipped his tea and smiled at me while I ran over 
the pages. 

"Page one hundred and thirty-two," I read aloud: 
The class struggle, therefore, presents itself in the 
present stage of social development between the wage- 
paying and the wage-paid classes." 

I looked at him triumphantly. 

"No mention there of class hatred," he smiled back. 

"But," I answered, "you say class struggle. " : 

"A different thing from class hatred," he replied. 
"And, believe me, we foment no hatred. We say that 
the class struggle is a law of social development. We 
are not responsible for it. We do not make the class 
struggle. We merely explain it, as Newton explained 
gravitation. We explain the nature of the conflict 
of interest that produces the class struggle." 

"But there should be no conflict of interest!" I 
cried. 

"I agree with you heartily," he answered. "That 
is what we socialists are trying to bring about, the 



CHALLENGES 29 

abolition of the conflict of interest. Pardon me. Let 
me read an extract." He took his book and turned 
back several pages. "Page one hundred and twenty- 
six: The cycle of class struggles which began with the 
dissolution of rude, tribal communism and the rise of 
private property will end with the passing of private 
property in the means of social existence. 

"But I disagree with you," the Bishop interposed, 
his pale, ascetic face betraying by a faint glow the 
intensity of his feelings. "Your premise is wrong. 
There is no such thing as a conflict of interest be 
tween labor and capital or, rather, there ought not 
to be." 

"Thank you," Ernest said gravely. "By that last 
statement you have given me back my premise." 

"But why should there be a conflict?" the Bishop 
demanded warmly. 

Ernest shrugged his shoulders. "Because we are 
so made, I guess." 

"But we are not so made !" cried the other. 

"Are you discussing the ideal man?" Ernest asked, 
- unselfish and godlike, and so few in numbers as to 
be practically non-existent, or are you discussing the 
common and ordinary average man?" 

"The common and ordinary man," was the answer. 

"Who is weak and fallible, prone to error?" 

Bishop Morehouse nodded. 

"And petty and selfish?" 



30 THE IRON HEEL 

Again he nodded. 

"Watch out !" Ernest warned. "I said selfish. " 

"The average man is selfish/ the Bishop affirmed 
valiantly. 

"Wants all he can get?" 

"Wants all he can get true but deplorable." 

"Then I ve got you." Ernest s jaw snapped like a 
trap. "Let me show you. Here is a man who works 
on the street railways." 

"He couldn t work if it weren t for capital/ the 
Bishop interrupted. 

"True, and you will grant that capital would perish 
if there were no labor to earn the dividends." 

The Bishop was silent. 

"Won t you?" Ernest insisted. 

The Bishop nodded. 

"Then our statements cancel each other," Ernest 
said in a matter-of-fact tone, "and we are where we 
were. Now to begin again. The workingmen on the 
street railway furnish the labor. The stockholders 
furnish the capital. By the joint effort of the working- 
men and the capital, money is earned. 1 They divide 
between them this money that is earned. Capital s 
share is called dividends. Labor s share is called 
wages." 

1 In those days, groups of predatory individuals controlled all the 
means of transportation, and for the use of same levied toll upon the 
public. 



CHALLENGES 31 

"Very good," the Bishop interposed. "And there 
is no reason that the division should not be amicable." 

"You have already forgotten what we had agreed 
upon/ 7 Ernest replied. "We agreed that the average 
man is selfish. He is the man that is. You have gone 
up in the air and are arranging a division between the 
kind of men that ought to be but are not. But to 
return, to the earth, the workingman, being selfish, 
wants all he can get in the division. The capitalist, 
being selfish, wants all he can get in the division. 
When there is only so much of the same thing, and when 
two men want all they can get of the same thing, there 
is a conflict of interest. This is the conflict of interest 
between labor and capital. And it is an irreconcilable 
conflict. As long as workingmen and capitalists exist, 
they will continue to quarrel over the division. If you 
were in San Francisco this afternoon, you d have to 
walk. There isn t a street car running." 

"Another strike?" [ the Bishop queried with alarm. 

"Yes, they re quarrelling over the division of the 
earnings of the street railways." 

Bishop Morehouse became excited. 

"It is wrong !" he cried. "It is so short-sighted on 

1 These quarrels were very common in those irrational and anarchic 
times. Sometimes the laborers refused to work. Sometimes the 
capitalists refused to let the laborers work. In the violence and tur 
bulence of such disagreements much property was destroyed and 
many lives lost. All this is inconceivable to us as inconceivable 
as another custom of that time, namely, the habit the men of the 
lower classes had of breaking the furniture when they quarrelled with, 
their wives. 



32 THE IRON HEEL 

the part of the workingmen. How can they hope to 
keep our sympathy - 

"When we are compelled to walk," Ernest said slyly. 

But Bishop Morehouse ignored him and went on : 

"Their outlook is too narrow. Men should be men, 
not brutes. There will be violence and murder now, 
and sorrowing widows and orphans. Capital and 
labor should be friends. They should work hand in 
hand and to their mutual benefit." 

"Ah, now you are up in the air again," Ernest re 
marked dryly. "Come back to earth. Remember, 
we agreed that the average man is selfish." 

"But he ought not to be !" the Bishop cried. 

"And there I agree with you," was Ernest s rejoinder. 
"He ought not to be selfish, but he will continue to be 
selfish as long as he lives in a social system that is 
based on pig-ethics." 

The Bishop was aghast, and my father chuckled. 

"Yes, pig-ethics," Ernest went on remorselessly. 
"That is the meaning of the capitalist system. And 
that is what your church is standing for, what you are 
preaching for every time you get up in the pulpit. 
Pig-ethics ! There is no other name for it." 

Bishop Morehouse turned appealingly to my father, 
but he laughed and nodded his head. 

"I m afraid Mr. Everhard is right," he said. "Lais 
sez-faire, the let-alone policy of each for himself and 
devil take the hindmost. As Mr. Everhard said the 



CHALLENGES 33 

other night, the function you churchmen perform ia 
to maintain the established order of society, and society 
is established on that foundation." 

"But that is not the teaching of Christ !" cried the 
Bishop. 

"The Church is not teaching Christ these days," 
Ernest put in quickly. "That is why the workingmen 
will have nothing to do with the Church. The Church 
condones the frightful brutality and savagery with 
which the capitalist class treats the working class." 

"The Church does not condone it," the Bishop ob 
jected. 

"The Church does not protest against it," Ernest 
replied. "And in so far as the Church does not protest, 
it condones, for remember the Church is supported by 
the capitalist class." 

"I had not looked at it in that light," the Bishop said 
naively. "You must be wrong. I know that there 
is much that is sad and wicked in this world. I know 
that the Church has lost the what you call the pro 
letariat." 

"You never had the proletariat," Ernest cried. 
"The proletariat has grown up outside the Church and 
without the Church." 

1 Proletariat: Derived originally from the Latin proletarii, the name 
given in the census of Servius Tullius to those who were of value 
to the state only as the rearers of offspring (proles ) ; in other words, 
they were of no importance either for wealth, or position, or excep 
tional ability. 
D 



34 THE IRON HEEL 

"I do not follow you," the Bishop said faintly. 

"Then let me explain. With the introduction of 
machinery and the factory system in the latter part of 
the eighteenth century, the great mass of the working 
people was separated from the land. The old system 
of labor was broken down. The working people were 
driven from their villages and herded in factory towns. 
The mothers and children were put to work at the new 
machines. Family life ceased. The conditions were 
frightful. It is a tale of blood." 

"I know, I know," Bishop Morehouse interrupted 
with an agonized expression on his face. "It was 
terrible. But it occurred a century and a half ago." 

"And there, a century and a half ago, originated the 
modern proletariat," Ernest continued. "And the 
Church ignored it. While a slaughter-house was made 
of the nation by the capitalists, the Church was dumb. 
It did not protest, as to-day it does not protest. As 
Austin Lewis l says, speaking of that time, those to 
whom the command Feed my lambs had been given, 
saw those lambs sold into slavery and worked to death 
without a protest. 2 The Church was dumb, then, and 

1 Candidate for Governor of California on the Socialist ticket in the 
fall election of 1906 Christian Era. An Englishman by birth, a writer 
of many books on political economy and philosophy, and one of the 
Socialist leaders of the times. 

2 There is no more horrible page in history than the treatment ot 
the child and women slaves in the English factories in the latter half 
of the eighteenth century of the Christian Era. In such industrial 
hells arose some of the proudest fortunes of that day. 



CHALLENGES 35 

before I go on I want you either flatly to agree with me 
or flatly to disagree with me. Was the Church dumb 
then?" 

Bishop Morehouse hesitated. Like Dr. Hammerfield, 
he was unused to this fierce " infighting/ as Ernest 
called it. 

"The history of the eighteenth century is written/ 
Ernest prompted. "If the Church was not dumb, it 
will*be found not dumb in the books." 

"I am afraid the Church was dumb/ the Bishop 
confessed. 

"And the Church is dumb to-day." 

"There I disagree," said the Bishop. 

Ernest paused, looked at him searchingly, and ac 
cepted the challenge. 

"All right," he said. "Let us see. In Chicago there 
are women who toil all the week for ninety cents. 
Has the Church protested?" 

"This is news to me," was the answer. "Ninety 
cents per week ! It is horrible !" 

"Has the Church protested?" Ernest insisted. 

"The Church does not know." The Bishop was 
struggling hard. 

"Yet the command to the Church was, Feed my 
lambs/ ; Ernest sneered. And then, the next mo 
ment, "Pardon my sneer, Bishop. But can you won 
der that we lose patience with you? When have you 
protested to your capitalistic congregations at the 



36 

working of children in the Southern cotton mills? 1 
Children, six and seven years of age, working every 
night at twelve-hour shifts ? They never see the blessed 
sunshine. They die like flies. The dividends are paid 

1 Everhard might have drawn a better illustration from the South 
ern Church s outspoken defence of chattel slavery prior to what is 
known as the "War of the Rebellion." Several such illustrations, 
culled from the documents of the times, are here appended. In 
1835 A.D., the General Assembly of the Presbyterian Church resolved 
that: "slavery is recognized in both the Old and the New Testaments, 
and is not condemned by the authority of God." The Charleston Bap 
tist Association issued the following, in an address, in 1835 A.D.: 
" The right of masters to dispose of the time of their slaves has 
been distinctly recognized by the Creator of all things, who is surely 
at liberty to vest the right of property over any object whomsoever He 
pleases." The Rev. E. D. Simon, Doctor of Divinity and professor 
in the Randolph-Macon Methodist College of Virginia, wrote : " Ex 
tracts from Holy Writ unequivocally assert the right of property in 
slaves, together with the usual incidents to that right. The right to buy 
and sell is clearly stated. Upon the whole, then, whether we consult the 
Jewish policy instituted by God himself, or the uniform opinion and 
practice of mankind in all ages, or the injunctions of the New Testa 
ment and the moral law, we are brought to the conclusion that slavery 
is not immoral. Having established the point that the first African 
slaves were legally brought into bondage, the right to detain their children 
in bondage follows as an indispensable consequence. Thus we see that 
the slavery that exists in America was founded in right." 

It is not at all remarkable that this same note should have been 
struck by the Church a generation or so later in relation to the defence 
of capitalistic property. In the great museum at Asgard there is a 
book entitled " Essays in Application," written by Henry van Dyke. 
The book was published in 1905 of the Christian Era. From what 
we can make out, Van Dyke must have been a Churchman. The 
book is a good example of what Everhard would have called bourgeois 
thinking. Note the similarity between the utterance of the Charleston 
Baptist Association quoted above, and the following utterance of Van 
Dyke seventy years later : " The Bible teaches that God owns the world. 
He distributes to every man according to His own good pleasure, con* 
/ormably to general laws." 



CHALLENGES 37 

out of their blood. And out of the dividends mag 
nificent churches are builded in New England, wherein 
your kind preaches pleasant platitudes to the sleek, 
full-bellied recipients of those dividends." 

"I did not know/ the Bishop murmured faintly. 
His face was pale, and he seemed suffering from 
nausea. 

"Then you have not protested?" 

The Bishop shook his head. 

"Then the Church is dumb to-day, as it was in the 
eighteenth century?" 

The Bishop was silent, and for once Ernest forbore 
to press the point. 

"And do not forget, whenever a churchman does 
protest, that he is discharged." 

"I hardly think that is fair," was the objection. 

"Will you protest?" Ernest demanded. 

"Show me evils, such as you mention, in our own com 
munity, and I will protest." 

"I ll show you," Ernest said quietly. "I am at your 
disposal. I will take you on a journey through hell." 

"And I shall protest." The Bishop straightened 
himself in his chair, and over his gentle face spread the 
harshness of the warrior. "The Church shall not be 
dumb!" 

"You will be discharged," was the warning. 

"I shall prove the contrary," was the retort. "I 
shall prove, if what you say is so, that the Church has 



38 THE IRON HEEL 

erred through ignorance. And, furthermore, I hold that 
whatever is horrible in industrial society is due to the 
ignorance of the capitalist class. It will mend all that is 
wrong as soon as it receives the message. And this 
message it shall be the duty of the Church to deliver." 

Ernest laughed. He laughed brutally, and I was 
driven to the Bishop s defence. 

"Remember," I said, "you see but one side of the 
shield. There is much good in us, though you give us 
credit for no good at all. Bishop Morehouse is right. 
The industrial wrong, terrible as you say it is, is due 
to ignorance. The divisions of society have become 
too widely separated." 

"The wild Indian is not so brutal and savage as the 
capitalist class," he answered ; and in that moment I 
hated him. 

"You do not know us," I answered. "We are not 
brutal and savage." 

"Prove it," he challenged. 

"How can I prove it . . . to you?" I was growing 
angry. 

He shook his head. "I do not ask you to prove it to 
me. I ask you to prove it to yourself." 

"I know," I said. 

"You know nothing," was his rude reply. 

"There, there, children," father said soothingly. 

"I don t care " I began indignantly, but Ernest 
interrupted. 



CHALLENGES 39 

"I understand you have money, or your father has, 
which is the same thing money invested in the Sierra 
Mills." 

"What has that to do with it?" I cried. 

"Nothing much/ he began slowly, "except that the 
gown you wear is stained with blood. The food you 
eat is a bloody stew. The blood of little children and 
of strong men is dripping from your very roof-beams. 
I can close my eyes, now, and hear it drip, drop, drip, 
drop, all about me." 

And suiting the action to the words, he closed his 
eyes and leaned back in his chair. I burst into tears 
of mortification and hurt vanity. I had never been so 
brutally treated in my life. Both the Bishop and my 
father were embarrassed and perturbed. They tried 
to lead the conversation away into easier channels; 
but Ernest opened his eyes, looked at me, and waved 
them aside. His mouth was stern, and his eyes too ; 
and in the latter there was no glint of laughter. What 
he was about to say, what terrible castigation he was 
going to give me, I never knew ; for at that moment 
a man, passing along the sidewalk, stopped and glanced 
in at us. He was a large man, poorly dressed, and 
on his back was a great load of rattan and bamboo 
stands, chairs, and screens. He looked at the house 
as if debating whether or not he should come in and 
try to sell some of his wares. 

"That man s name is Jackson," Ernest said. 



40 THE IRON HEEL 

"With that strong body of his he should be at work, 
and not peddling," 1 I answered curtly. 

"Notice the sleeve of his left arm/ Ernest said 
gently. 

I looked, and saw that the sleeve was empty. 

"It was some of the blood from that arm that I 
heard dripping from your roof-beams," Ernest said with 
continued gentleness. "He lost his arm in the Sierra 
Mills, and like a broken-down horse you turned him out 
on the highway to die. When I say you/ I mean the 
superintendent and the officials that you and the other 
stockholders pay to manage the mills for you. It was 
an accident. It was caused by his trying to save the 
company a few dollars. The toothed drum of the picker 
caught his arm. He might have let the small flint that 
he saw in the teeth go through. It would have smashed 
out a double row of spikes. But he reached for the 
flint, and his arm was picked and clawed to shreds from 
the finger tips to the shoulder. It was at night. The 
mills were working overtime. They paid a fat dividend 
that quarter. Jackson had been working many hours, 
and his muscles had lost their resiliency and snap. 
They made his movements a bit slow. That was why 
the machine caught him. He had a wife and three 
children." 

1 In that day there were many thousands of these poor merchants 
called pedlers. They carried their whole stock in trade from door to 
door. It was a most wasteful expenditure of energy. Distribution 
was as confused and irrational as the whole general system of society. 



CHALLENGES 41 

"And what did the company do for him?" I 
asked. 

"Nothing. Oh, yes, they did do something. They 
successfully fought the damage suit he brought when 
he came out of hospital. The company employs very 
efficient lawyers, you know." 

"You have not told the whole story," I said with 
conviction. "Or else you do not know the whole story. 
Maybe the man was insolent." 

"Insolent! Ha! ha!" His laughter was Meph- 
istophelian. " Great God ! Insolent ! And with his 
arm chewed off ! Nevertheless he was a meek and 
lowly servant, and there is no record of his having been 
insolent." 

"But the courts," I urged. "The case would not 
have been decided against him had there been no more 
to the affair than you have mentioned." 

"Colonel Ingram is leading counsel for the company. 
He is a shrewd lawyer." Ernest looked at me intently 
for a moment, then went on. "I ll tell you what you 
do, Miss Cunningham. You investigate Jackson s 
case." 

"I had already determined to," I said coldly. 

"All right," he beamed good-naturedly, "and I ll 
tell you where to find him. But I tremble for you when 
I think of all you are to prove by Jackson s arm." 

And so it came about that both the Bishop and I 
accepted Ernest s challenges. They went away to- 



42 THE IRON HEEL 

gether, leaving me smarting with a sense of injustice 
that had been done me and my class. The man was a 
beast. I hated him, then, and consoled myself with 
the thought that his behavior was what was to be ex 
pected from a man of the working class. 



CHAPTER in 

JACKSON S ARM 

LITTLE did I dream the fateful part Jackson s arm 
was to play in my life. Jackson himself did not impress 
me when I hunted him out. I found him in a crazy, 
ramshackle 1 house down near the bay on the edge of 
the marsh. Pools of stagnant water stood around the 
house, their surfaces covered with a green and putrid- 
looking scum, while the stench that arose from them 
was intolerable. 

I found Jackson the meek and lowly man he had been 
described. He was making some sort of rattan-work, 
and he toiled on stolidly while I talked with him. But 
in spite of his meekness and lowliness, I fancied I 
caught the first note of a nascent bitterness in him 
when he said : 

"They might a-given me a job as watchman, 2 any 
way." 

1 An adjective descriptive of ruined and dilapidated houses in 
which great numbers of the working people found shelter in those days. 
They invariably paid rent, and, considering the value of such houses, 
enormous rent, to the landlords. 

2 In those days thievery was incredibly prevalent. Everybody 
stole property from everybody else. The lords of society stole le 
gally or else legalized their stealing, while the poorer classes stole ille- 

43 



44 THE IRON HEEL 

I got little out of him. He struck me as stupid, 
and yet the deftness with which he worked with his 
one hand seemed to belie his stupidity. This sug 
gested an idea to me. 

"How did you happen to get your arm caught in the 
machine?" I asked. 

He looked at me in a slow and pondering way, and 
shook his head. "I don t know. It just happened." 

" Carelessness?" I prompted. 

"No," he answered, "I ain t for callin it that. I 
was workin overtime, an I guess I was tired out some. 
I worked seventeen years in them mills, an I ve took 
notice that most of the accidents happens just before 
whistle-blow. 1 I m willin to bet that more accidents 
happens in the hour before whistle-blow than in all the 
rest of the day. A man ain t so quick after workin 
steady for hours. I ve seen too many of em cut up an 
gouged an chawed not to know." 

"Many of them?" I queried. 

"Hundreds an hundreds, an children, too." 

With the exception of the terrible details, Jackson s 
story of his accident was the same as that I had already 

gaily. Nothing was safe unless guarded. Enormous numbers of 
men were employed as watchmen to protect property. The houses 
of the well-to-do were a combination of safe deposit vault and for 
tress. The appropriation of the personal belongings of others by our 
own children of to-day is looked upon as a rudimentary survival of 
the theft-characteristic that in those early times was universal. 

(jjThe laborers were called to work and dismissed by savage 
screaming, nerve-racking steam-whistles. 



JACKSON S ARM 45 

heard. When I asked him if he had broken some rule 
of working the machinery, he shook his head. 

"I chucked off the belt with my right hand," he said, 
"an 7 made a reach for the flint with my left. I didn t 
stop to see if the belt was off. I thought my right 
hand had done it only it didn t. I reached quick, 
and the belt wasn t all the way off. And then my 
arm^vas chewed off." 

"It must have been painful," I said sympathetically. 

"The crunchin of the bones wasn t nice," was his 
answer. 

His mind was rather hazy concerning the damage 
suit. Only one thing was clear to him, and that was 
that he had not got any damages. He had a feeling 
that the testimony of the foremen and the superin 
tendent had brought about the adverse decision of the 
court. Their testimony, as he put it, " wasn t what 
it ought to have ben." And to them I resolved to go. 

One thing was plain, Jackson s situation was 
wretched. His wife was in ill health, and he was un 
able to earn, by his rattan-work and peddling, suffi 
cient food for the family. He was back in his rent, and 
the oldest boy, a lad of eleven, had started to work in 
the mills. 

"They might a-given me that watchman s job," 
were his last words as I went away. 

By the time I had seen the lawyer who had handled 
Jackson s case, and the two foremen and the superin- 



46 THE IRON HEEL 

tendent at the mills who had testified, I began to feel 
that there was something after all in Ernest s contention. 

He was a weak and inefficient-looking man, the law 
yer, and at sight of him I did not wonder that Jackson s 
case had been lost. My first thought was that it had 
served Jackson right for getting such a lawyer. But the * 
next moment two of Ernest s statements came flashing 
into my consciousness: "The company employs very 
efficient lawyers" and " Colonel Ingram is a shrewd 
lawyer." I did some rapid thinking. It dawned 
upon me that of course the company could afford finer 
legal talent than could a workingman like Jackson. 
But this was merely a minor detail. There was some 
very good reason, I was sure, why Jackson s case had 
gone against him. 

"Why did you lose the case?" I asked. 

The lawyer was perplexed and worried for a moment, 
and I found it in my heart to pity the wretched little 
creature. Then he began to whine. I do believe his 
whine was congenital. He was a man beaten at birth. 
He whined about the testimony. The witnesses had 
given only the evidence that helped the other side. 
Not one word could he get out of them that would have 
helped Jackson. They knew which side their bread 
was buttered on. Jackson was a fool. He had been 
brow-beaten and confused by Colonel Ingram. Colonel 
Ingram was brilliant at cross-examination. He had 
made Jackson answer damaging questions. 



JACKSON S ARM 47 

"How could his answers be damaging if he had the 
right on his side?" I demanded. 

"What s right got to do with it ? " he demanded back. 
"You see all those books." He moved his hand over 
the array of volumes on the walls of his tiny office. 
"All my reading and studying of them has taught me 
that law is one thing and right is another thing. Ask 
any \awyer. You go to Sunday-school to learn what is 
right. But you go to those books to learn . . . law." 

"Do you mean to tell me that Jackson had the right 
on his side and yet was beaten ? " I queried tentatively. 
"Do you mean to tell me that there is no justice in 
Judge Caldwell s court?" 

The little lawyer glared at me a moment, and then 
the belligerence faded out of his face. 

"I hadn t a fair chance," he began whining again. 
"They made a fool out of Jackson and out of me, too. 
What chance had I ? Colonel Ingram is a great lawyer. 
If he wasn t great, would he have charge of the law 
business of the Sierra Mills, of the Erston Land Syndi 
cate, of the Berkeley Consolidated, of the Oakland, 
San Leandro, and Pleasanton Electric? He s a cor 
poration lawyer, and corporation lawyers are not paid 
for being fools. 1 What do you think the Sierra Mills 

1 The function of the corporation lawyer was to serve, by corrupt 
methods, the money-grabbing propensities of the corporations. It is 
on record that Theodore Roosevelt, at that time President of the 
United States, said in 1905 A.D., in his address at Harvard Commence 
ment : " We all know that, as things actually are, many of the most 



48 THE IRON HEEL 

alone give him twenty thousand dollars a year for? 
Because he s worth twenty thousand dollars a year 
to them, that s what for. I m not worth that much. 
If I was, I wouldn t be on the outside, starving and 
taking cases like Jackson s. What do you think I d 
have got if I d won Jackson s case?" 

"You d have robbed him, most probably," 1 I an 
swered. 

"Of course I would," he cried angrily. "I ve got to 
live, haven t I? {v 

"He has a wife and children," I chided. 

"So have I a wife and children," he retorted. "And 
there s not a soul in this world except myself that cares 
whether they starve or not." 

His face suddenly softened, and he opened his watch 
and showed me a small photograph of a woman and two 
little girls pasted inside the case. 

"There they are. Look at them. We ve had a 
hard time, a hard time. I had hoped to send them 
away to the country if I d won Jackson s case. They re 
not healthy here, but I can t afford to send them 
away." 

influential and most highly remunerated members of the Bar in every 
centre of wealth, make it their special task to work out bold and ingenious 
schemes by which their wealthy clients, individual or corporate, can evade 
the laws which were made to regulate, in the interests of the public, the 
uses of great wealth." 

\ * A typical illustration of the internecine strife that permeated all 
society. Men preyed upon one another like ravening wolves. The 
big wolves ate the little wolves, and in the social pack Jackson was ona 
of the least of the little wolves. 



JACKSON S ARM 49 

When I started to leave, he dropped back into his 
whine. 

"I hadn t the ghost of a chance. Colonel Ingram 
and Judge Caldwell are pretty friendly. I m not saying 
that if I d got the right kind of testimony out of their 
witnesses on cross-examination, that friendship would 
have decided the case. And yet I must say that Judge 
Caldwell did a whole lot to prevent my getting that 
very testimony. Why, Judge Caldwell and Colonel 
Ingram belong to the same lodge and the same club. 
They live in the same neighborhood one I can t 
afford. And their wives are always in and out of each 
other s houses. They re always having whist parties 
and such things back and forth." 

"And yet you think Jackson had the right of 
it?" I asked, pausing for the moment on the thresh 
old. 

"I don t think; I know it," was his answer. "And 
at first I thought he had some show, too. But I 
didn t tell my wife. I didn t want to disappoint her. 
She had her heart set on a trip to the country hard 
enough as it was." 

"Why did you not call attention to the fact that 
Jackson was trying to save the machinery from being- 
injured?" I asked Peter Donnelly, one of the foremen 
who had testified at the trial. 

He pondered a long time before replying. Then he 
east an anxious look about him and said: 



50 THE IRON HEEL 

"Because I ve a good wife an three of the sweetest 
children ye ever laid eyes on, that s why." 

"I do not understand," I said. 

"In other words, because it wouldn t a-ben healthy," 
he answered. 

"You mean " I began. 

But he interrupted passionately. 

"I mean what I said. It s long years I ve worked in 
the mills. I began as a little lad on the spindles. I 
worked up ever since. It s by hard work I got to 
my present exalted position. I m a foreman, if you 
please. An I doubt me if there s a man in the mills 
that d put out a hand to drag me from drownin . I 
used to belong to the union. But I ve stayed by the 
company through two strikes. They called me scab. 
There s not a man among em to-day to take a drink 
with me if I asked him. D ye see the scars on me head 
where I was struck with flying bricks? There ain t 
a child at the spindles but what would curse me name. 
Me only friend is the company. It s not me duty, but 
me bread an butter an the life of me children to stand 
by the mills. That s why." 

"Was Jackson to blame?" I asked. 

"He should a-got the damages. He was a good 
worker an never made trouble." 

"Then you were not at liberty to tell the whole 
truth, as you had sworn to do?" 

He shook his head. 



JACKSON S ARM 51 

"The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the 
truth?" I said solemnly. 

Again his face became impassioned, and he lifted 
it, not to me, but to heaven. 

"I d let me soul an body burn in everlastin hell 
for them children of mine/ was his answer. 

Henry Dallas, the superintendent, was a vulpine- 
faced creature who regarded me insolently and refused 
to talk. Not a word could I get from him concerning 
the trial and his testimony. But with the other fore 
man I had better luck. James Smith was a hard-faced 
man, and my heart sank as I encountered him. He, 
too, gave me the impression that he was not a free 
agent, and as we talked I began to see that he was men 
tally superior to the average of his kind. He agreed 
with Peter Donnelly that Jackson should have got 
damages, and he went farther and called the action 
heartless and cold-blooded that had turned the worker 
adrift after he had been made helpless by the accident. 
Also, he explained that there were many accidents 
in the mills, and that the company s policy was 
to fight to the bitter end all consequent damage 
suits. 

"It means hundreds of thousands a year to the stock 
holders," he said; and as he spoke I remembered the 
last dividend that had been paid my father, and the 
pretty gown for me and the books for him that had 
been bought out of that dividend. I remembered 



52 THE IRON HEEL 

Ernest s charge that my gown was stained with blood, 
and my flesh began to crawl underneath my garments. 

"When you testified at the trial, you didn t point out 
that Jackson received his accident through trying to 
save the machinery from damage? " I said. 

"No, I did not," was the answer, and his mouth set 
bitterly. "I testified to the effect that Jackson injured 
himself by neglect and carelessness, and that the com 
pany was not in any way to blame or liable." 

"Was it carelessness?" I asked. 

"Call it that, or any thing you want to call it. The fact 
is, a man gets tired after he s been working for hours." 

I was becoming interested in the man. He certainly 
was of a superior kind. 

"You are better educated than most workingmen," 
I said. 

"I went through high school," he replied. "I 
worked my way through doing janitor-work. I wanted 
to go through the university. But my father died, 
and I came to work in the mills. 

"I wanted to become a naturalist," he explained 
shyly, as though confessing a weakness. "I love 
animals. But I came to work in the mills. When I 
was promoted to foreman I got married, then the family 
came, and . . . well, I wasn t my own boss any more." 

"What do you mean by that?" I asked. 

"I was explaining why I testified at the trial the way 
I did why I followed instructions." 



JACKSON S ARM 53 

"Whose instructions?" 

"Colonel Ingram. He outlined the evidence I was 
to give." 

"And it lost Jackson s case for him." 

He nodded, and the blood began to rise darkly in his 
face. 

"And Jackson had a wife and two children dependent 
on feim." 

"I know," he said quietly, though his face was grow 
ing darker. 

"Tell me," I went on, "was it easy to make yourself 
over from what you were, say in high school, to the man 
you must have become to do such a thing at the trial?" 

The suddenness of his outburst startled and fright 
ened me. He ripped i out a savage oath, and clenched 
his fist as though about to strike me. 

"I beg your pardon," he said the next moment. "No, 
it was not easy. And now I guess you can go away. 
You ve got all you wanted out of me. But let me tell 
you this before you go. It won t do you any good to 
repeat anything I ve said. I ll deny it, and there are 
no witnesses. I ll deny every word of it; and if I 
have to, I ll do it under oath on the witness stand." 

After my interview with Smith I went to my father s 
office in the Chemistry Building and there encountered 

1 It is interesting to note the virilities of language that were com 
mon speech in that day, as indicative of the life, red of claw and fang, 
that was then lived. Reference is here made, of course, not to the 
oath of Smith, but to the Yerb ripped used by Avis Everhard. 



54 THE IRON HEEL 

Ernest. It was quite unexpected, but he met me with 
his bold eyes and firm hand-clasp, and with that curi 
ous blend of his of awkwardness and ease. It was as 
though our last stormy meeting was forgotten; but I 
was not in the mood to have it forgotten. 

"I have been looking up Jackson s case," I said 
abruptly. 

He was all interested attention, and waited for me to 
go on, though I could see in his eyes the certitude that 
my convictions had been shaken. 

"He seems to have been badly treated," I confessed. 
"I I think some of his blood is dripping from our 
roof-beams." 

"Of course," he answered. "If Jackson and all his 
fellows were treated mercifully, the dividends would 
not be so large." 

"I shall never be able to take pleasure in pretty gowns 
again," I added. 

I felt humble and contrite, and was aware of a sweet 
feeling that Ernest was a sort of father confessor. 
Then, as ever after, his strength appealed to me. It 
seemed to radiate a promise of peace and protec 
tion. 

"Nor will you be able to take pleasure in sackcloth," 
he said gravely. "There are the jute mills, you know, 
and the same thing goes on there. It goes on every 
where. Our boasted civilization is based upon blood, 
soaked in blood, and neither you nor I nor any of us 



JACKSON S ARM 55 

can escape the scarlet stain. The men you talked with 
who were they?" 

I told him all that had taken place. 

"And not one of them was a free agent," he said. 
"They were all tied to the merciless industrial machine. 
And the pathos of it and the tragedy is that they are 
tied by their heart-strings. Their children always 

the young life that it is their instinct to protect. This 

f&gt; 

instinct is stronger than any ethic they possess. My 
father ! He lied, he stole, he did all sorts of dishon 
orable things to put bread into my mouth and into the 
mouths of my brothers and sisters. He was a slave to 
the industrial machine, and it stamped his life out, 
worked him to death." 

"But you," I interjected. "You are surely a free 
agent." 

"Not wholly," he replied. "I am not tied by my 
heart-strings. I am often thankful that I have no 
children, and I dearly love children. Yet if I married 
I should not dare to have any." 

"That surely is bad doctrine," I cried. 

"I know it is," he said sadly. "But it is expedient 
doctrine. I am a revolutionist, and it is a perilous 
vocation." 

I laughed incredulously. 

"If I tried to enter your father s house at night to 
steal his dividends from the Sierra Mills, what would he 
do?" 



56 THE IRON HEEL; 

"He sleeps with a revolver on the stand by the bed," 
I answered. "He would most probably shoot you." 

""And if I and a few others should lead a million and 
a half of men 1 into the houses of all the well-to-do, there 
would be a great deal of shooting, wouldn t there ? " 

"Yes, but you are not doing that," I objected. 

"It is precisely what I am doing. And we intend to 
take, not the mere wealth in the houses, but all the 
sources of that wealth, all the mines, and railroads, and 
factories, and banks, and stores. That is the re volution. 
It is truly perilous. There will be more shooting, I am 
afraid, than even I dream of. But as I was saying, no 
one to-day is a free agent. We are all caught up in the 
wheels and cogs of the industrial machine. You found 
that you were, and that the men you talked with were. 
Talk with more of them. Go and see Colonel Ingram. 
Look up the reporters that kept Jackson s case out of 
the papers, and the editors that run the papers. You 
will find them all slaves of the machine." 

A little later in our conversation I asked him a sim 
ple little question about the liability of workingmen to 
accidents, and received a statistical lecture in return. 

"It is all in the books," he said. "The figures have 
been gathered, and it has been proved conclusively that 

1 This reference is to the socialist vote cast in the United States in 
1910. The rise of this vote clearly indicates the swift growth of the 
party of revolution. Its voting strength in the United States in 1888 
was 2068; in 1902, 127,713; in 1904, 435,040; in 1908, 1,108,427; 
and in 1910, 1,688,211. 



JACKSON S ARM 57 

accidents rarely occur in the first hours of the morning 
work, but that they increase rapidly in the succeeding 
hours as the workers grow tired and slower in both 
their muscular and mental processes. 

"Why, do you know that your father has three times 
as many chances for safety of life and limb N than has a 
workingman? He has. The insurance/companies 
know. They will charge him four dollars and twenty 
cents a year on a thousand-dollar accident policy, and 
for the same policy they will charge a laborer fifteen 
dollars." 

"And you?" I asked; and in the moment of asking 
I was aware of a solicitude that was something more 
than slight. 

"Oh, as a revolutionist, I have about eight chances 
to the workingman s one of being injured or killed," 
he answered carelessly. "The insurance companies 
charge the highly trained chemists that handle explo 
sives eight times what they charge the workingmen. 
I don t think they d insure me at all. Why did you ask?" 

My eyes fluttered, and I could feel the blood warm in 
my face. It was not that he had caught me in my 

1 In the terrible wolf-struggle of those centuries, no man was per 
manently safe, no matter how much wealth he amassed. Out of fear 
for the welfare of their families, men devised the scheme of insurance. 
To us, in this intelligent age, such a device is laughably absurd and 
primitive. But in that age insurance was a very serious matter. The 
amusing part of it is that the funds of the insurance companies were 
frequently plundered and wasted by the very officials who were in 
trusted with the management of them. 



58 THE IRON HEEL 

solicitude, but that I had caught myself, and in his 
presence. 

Just then my father came in and began making 
preparations to depart with me. Ernest returned 
some books he had borrowed, and went away first. 
But just as he was going, he turned and said : 

"Oh, by the way, while you are ruining your own 
peace of mind and I am ruining the Bishop s, you d 
better look up Mrs. Wickson and Mrs. Pertonwaithe. 
Their husbands, you know, are the two principal stock 
holders in the Mills. Like all the rest of humanity, 
those two women are tied to the machine, but they are 
so tied that they sit on top of it." 



CHAPTER IV 

SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 

Tni5 more I thought of Jackson s arm, the more shaken 
I was. I was confronted by the concrete. For the 
first time I was seeing life. My university life, and 
study and culture, had not been real. I had learned 
nothing but theories of life and society that looked all 
very well on the printed page, but now I had seen life 
itself. Jackson s arm was a fact of life. "The fact, 
man, the irrefragable fact !" of Ernest s was ringing in 
my consciousness. 

It seemed monstrous, impossible, that our whole 
society was based upon blood. And yet there was 
Jackson. I could not get away from him. Constantly 
my thought swung back to him as the compass to the 
Pole. He had been monstrously treated. His blood 
had not been paid for in order that a larger dividend 
might be paid. And I knew a score of happy compla 
cent families that had received those dividends and 
by that much had profited by Jackson s blood. If one 
man could be so monstrously treated and society move 

on its way unheeding, might not many men be so 

59 



60 THE IRON HEEL 

monstrously treated? I remembered Ernest s women 
of Chicago who toiled for ninety cents a week, and the 
child slaves of the Southern cotton mills he had described. 
And I could see their wan white hands, from which the 
blood had been pressed, at work upon the cloth out of 
which had been made my gown. And then I thought 
of the Sierra Mills and the dividends that had been 
paid, and I saw the blood of Jackson upon my gown as 
well. Jackson I could not escape. Always my medi 
tations led me back to him. 

Down in the depths of me I had a feeling that I stood 
on the edge of a precipice. It was as though I were 
about to see a new and awful revelation of life. And 
not I alone. My whole world was turning over. 
There was my father. I could see the effect Ernest 
was beginning to have on him. And then there was 
the Bishop. When I had last seen him he had looked 
a sick man. He was at high nervous tension, and in his 
eyes there was unspeakable horror. From the little 
I learned I knew that Ernest had been keeping his 
promise of taking him through hell. But what scenes 
of hell the Bishop s eyes had seen, I knew not, for he 
seemed too stunned to speak about them. 

Once, the feeling strong upon me that my little world 
and all the world was turning over, I thought of Ernest 
as the cause of it; and also I thought, "We were so 
happy and peaceful before he came!" And the next 
moment I was aware that the thought was a treason 



SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 61 

against truth, and Ernest rose before me transfigured, 
the apostle of truth, with shining brows and the fear 
lessness of one of God s own angels, battling for the 
truth and the right, and battling for the succor of the 
poor and lonely and oppressed. And then there arose 
before me another figure, the Christ ! He, too, had 
taken the part of the lowly and oppressed, and against 
all the established power of priest and pharisee. And 
I remembered his end upon the cross, and my heart 
contracted with a pang as I thought of Ernest. Was 
he, too, destined for a cross ? he, with his clarion call 
and war-noted voice, and all the fine man s vigor of him ! 

And in that moment I knew that I loved him, and 
that I was melting with desire to comfort him. I 
thought of his life. A sordid, harsh, and meagre life 
it must have been. And I thought of his father, who 
had lied and stolen for him and been worked to death. 
And he himself had gone into the mills when he was ten ! 
All my heart seemed bursting with desire to fold my 
/arms around him, and to rest his head on my breast 
his head that must be weary with so many thoughts; 
and to give him rest just rest and easement and 
forgetfulness for a tender space. 

I met Colonel Ingram at a church reception. Him I 
knew well and had known well for many years. I 
trapped him behind large palms and rubber plants, 
though he did not know he was trapped. He met me 
with the conventional gayety and gallantry. He was 



62 THE IRON HEEL 

ever a graceful man, diplomatic, tactful, and con 
siderate. And as for appearance, he was the most 
distinguished-looking man in our society. Beside 
him even the venerable head of the university looked 
tawdry and small. 

And yet I found Colonel Ingram situated the same as 
the unlettered mechanics. He was not a free agent. 
He, too, was bound upon the wheel. I shall never forget 
the change in him when I mentioned Jackson s case. 
His smiling good-nature vanished like a ghost. A 
sudden, frightful expression distorted his well-bred 
face. I felt the same alarm that I had felt when 
James Smith broke out. But Colonel Ingram did not 
curse. That was the slight difference that was left 
between the workingman and him. He was famed as 
a wit, but he had no wit now. And, unconsciously, 
this way and that he glanced for avenues of escape. 
But he was trapped amid the palms and rubber 
trees. 

Oh, he was sick of the sound of Jackson s name. 
Why had I brought the matter up ? He did not relish 
my joke. It was poor taste on my part, and very 
inconsiderate. Did I not know that in his profession 
personal feelings did not count ? He left his personal 
feelings at home when he went down to the office. At 
the office he had only professional feelings. 

"Should Jackson have received damages?" I asked. 

"Certainly," he answered. "That is, personally, I 



SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 63 

have a feeling that he should. But that has nothing 
to do with the legal aspects of the case." 

He was getting his scattered wits slightly in hand. 

"Tell me, has right anything to do with the law?" I 
asked. 

"You have used the wrong initial consonant," he 
smiled in answer. 

"Might?" I queried; and he nodded his head. 
"And yet we are supposed to get justice by means of 
the law?" 

"That is the paradox of it," he countered. "We 
do get justice." 

"You are speaking professionally now, are you not ?" 
I asked. 

Colonel Ingram blushed, actually blushed, and again 
he looked anxiously about him for a way of escape. 
But I blocked his path and did not offer to move. 

"Tell me," I said, "when one surrenders his personal 
feelings to his professional feelings, may not the action 
be defined as a sort of spiritual mayhem?" 

I did not get an answer. Colonel Ingram had in- 
gloriously bolted, overturning a palm in his flight. 

Next I tried the newspapers. I wrote a quiet, re 
strained, dispassionate account of Jackson s case. I 
made no charges against the men with whom I had 
talked, nor, for that matter, did I even mention them. 
I gave the actual facts of the case, the long years Jack 
son had worked in the mills, his effort to save the ma* 



64 THE IRON HEEL 

chinery from damage and the consequent accident, 
and his own present wretched and starving condition. 
The three local newspapers rejected my communication, 
likewise did the two weeklies. 

I got hold of Percy Layton. He was a graduate of 
the university, had gone in for journalism, and was then 
serving his apprenticeship as reporter on the most in 
fluential of the three newspapers. He smiled when I 
asked him the reason the newspapers suppressed all 
mention of Jackson or his case. 

" Editorial policy," he said. "We have nothing to 
do with that. It s up to the editors." 

"But why is it policy?" I asked. 

"We re all solid with the corporations," he answered. 
"If you paid advertising rates, you couldn t get any 
such matter into the papers. A man who tried to 
smuggle it in would lose his job. You couldn t get 
it in if you paid ten times the regular advertising 
rates." 

"How about your own policy?" I questioned. "It 
would seem your function is to twist truth at the com 
mand of your employers, who, in turn, obey the behests 
of the corporations." 

"I haven t anything to do with that." He looked 
uncomfortable for the moment, then brightened as he 
saw his way out. "I, myself, do not write untruthful 
things. I keep square all right with my own conscience. 
Of course, there s lots that s repugnant in the course of 



SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 65- 

the day s work. But then, you see, that s all part of 
the day s work," he wound up boyishly. 

"Yet you expect to sit at an editor s desk some day 
and conduct a policy." 

"I ll be case-hardened by that time," was his reply. 

"Since you are not yet case-hardened, tell me what 
you think right now about the general editorial policy." 

"I don t think," he answered quickly. "One can t 
kick (Tver the ropes if he s going to succeed in journalism. 
I ve learned that much, at any rate." 

And he nodded his young head sagely. 

"But the right?" I persisted. 

"You don t understand the game. Of course it s 
all right, because it comes out all right, don t you 
see?" 

"Delightfully vague," I murmured; but my heart 
was aching for the youth of him, and I felt that I must 
either scream or burst into tears. 

I was beginning to see through the appearances of 
the society in which I had always lived, and to find the 
frightful realities that were beneath. There seemed 
a tacit conspiracy against Jackson, and I was aware of 
a thrill of sympathy for the whining lawyer who had 
ingloriously fought his case. But this tacit conspiracy 
grew large. Not alone was it aimed against Jackson. 
It was aimed against every workingman who was 
maimed in the mills. And if against every man in 
the millSj why not against every man in all the other 



66 THE IRON HEEL 

mills and factories? In fact, was it not true of all 
the industries? 

And if this was so, then society was a lie. I shrank 
back from my own conclusions. It was too terrible 
and awful to be true. But there was Jackson, and 
Jackson s arm, and the blood that stained my gown 
and dripped from my own roof-beams. And there were 
many Jacksons hundreds of them in the mills alone, 
as Jackson himself had said. Jackson I could not escape. 

I saw Mr. Wickson and Mr. Pertoriwaithe, the two 
men who held most of the stock in the Sierra Mills. 
But I could not shake them as I had shaken the me 
chanics in their employ. I discovered that they had 
an ethic superior to that of the rest of society. It was 
what I may call the aristocratic ethic or the master 
ethic. 1 They talked in large ways of policy, and they 
identified policy and right. And to me they talked 
in fatherly ways, patronizing my youth and inex 
perience. They were the most hopeless of all I had 
encountered in my quest. They believed absolutely 
that their conduct was right. There was no question 
about it, no discussion. They were convinced that 
they were the saviours of society, and that it was they 
who made happiness for the many. And they drew 
pathetic pictures of what would be the sufferings of 

1 Before Avis Everhard was born, John Stuart Mill, in his essay, 
On Liberty, wrote: "Wherever there is an ascendant class, a large 
portion of the morality emanates from its class interests and its class 
feelings of superiority." 



SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 67 

the working class were it not for the employment that 
they, and they alone, by their wisdom, provided for it. 

Fresh from these two masters, I met Ernest and 
related my experience. He looked at me with a pleased 
expression, and said : 

" Really, this is fine. You are beginning to dig truth 
for yourself. It is your own empirical generalization, 
and it is correct. No man in the industrial machine is 
a free-will agent, except the large capitalist, and he 
isn t, if you ll pardon the Irishism. 1 You see, the mas 
ters are quite sure that they are right in what they are 
doing. That is the crowning absurdity of the whole 
situation. They are so tied by their human nature 
that they can t do a thing unless they think it is right. 
They must have a sanction for their acts. 

" When they want to do a thing, in business of course, 
they must wait till there arises in their brains, some 
how, a religious, or ethical, or scientific, or philosophic, 
concept that the thing is right. And then they go 
ahead and do it, unwitting that one of the weaknesses 
of the human mind is that the wish is parent to the 
thought. No matter what they want to do, the sanc 
tion always comes. They are superficial casuists. 
They are Jesuitical. They even see their way to doing 
wrong that right may come of it. One of the pleasant 
and axiomatic fictions they have created is that they 

1 Verbal contradictions, called bulls, were long an amiable weakness 
of the ancient Irish. 



68 THE IRON HEEL 

are superior to the rest of mankind in wisdom and 
efficiency. Therefrom comes their sanction to manage 
the bread and butter of the rest of mankind. They 
have even resurrected the theory of the divine right of 
Y - kings commercial kings in their case. 1 

"The weakness in their position lies in that they 
are merely business men. They are not philosophers. 
They are not biologists nor sociologists. If they were, 
of course all would be well. A business man who was 
also a biologist and a sociologist would know, approxi 
mately, the right thing to do for humanity. But, out 
side the realm of business, these men are stupid. They 
know only business. They do not know mankind nor 
society, and yet they set themselves up as arbiters of 
the fates of the hungry millions and all the other mill 
ions thrown in. History, some day, will have an 
excruciating laugh at their expense." 

I was not surprised when I had my talk out with 
Mrs. Wickson and Mrs. Pertonwaithe. They were 
society women. 2 Their homes were palaces. They 

1 The newspapers, in 1902 of that era, credited the president of the 
Anthracite Coal Trust, George F. Baer, with the enunciation of the 
following principle : " The rights and interests of the laboring man will 
be protected by the Christian men to whom God in His infinite wisdom 
has given the property interests of the country." 

2 Society is here used in a restricted sense, a common usage of the 
times to denote the gilded drones that did no labor, but only glutted 
themselves at the honey-vats of the workers. Neither the business 
men nor the laborers had time or opportunity for society. Society 
was the creation of the idle rich who toiled not and who in this way 
played. 



SLAVES OF THE MACHINE 69 

had many homes scattered over the country, in the 
mountains, on lakes, and by the sea. They were 
tended by armies of servants, and their social activi 
ties were bewildering. They patronized the university 
and the churches, and the pastors especially bowed 
at their knees in meek subservience. 1 They were 
powers, these two women, what of the money that was 
theijs. The power of subsidization of thought was 
theirs to a remarkable degree, as I was soon to learn 
under Ernest s tuition. 

They aped their husbands, and talked in the same 
large ways about policy, and the duties and responsibili 
ties of the rich. They were swayed by the same ethic 
that dominated their husbands the ethic of their 
class ; and they uttered glib phrases that their own ears 
did not understand. 

Also, they grew irritated when I told them of the 
deplorable condition of Jackson s family, and when I 
wondered that they had made no voluntary provision 
for the man. I was told that they thanked no one for 
instructing them in their social duties. When I asked 
them flatly to assist Jackson, they as flatly refused. 
The astounding thing about it was that they refused 
in almost identically the same language, and this in 
face of the fact that I interviewed them separately and 
that one did not know that I had seen or was going to 

1 " Bring on your tainted money," was the expressed sentiment of 
the Church during this period. 



70 THE IRON HEEL 

see the other. Their common reply was that they were 
glad of the opportunity to make it perfectly plain that 
no premium would ever be put on carelessness by them ; 
nor would they, by paying for accident, tempt the poor 
to hurt themselves in the machinery. 1 

And they were sincere, these two women. They 
were drunk with conviction of the superiority of their 
class and of themselves. They had a sanction, in their 
own class-ethic, for every act they performed. As I 
drove away from Mrs. Pertonwaithe s great house, I 
looked back at it, and I remembered Ernest s expres 
sion that they were bound to the machine, but that 
they were so bound that they sat on top of it. 

1 In the files of the Outlook, a critical weekly of the period, in the 
number dated August 18, 1906, is related the circumstance of a work- 
ingman losing his arm, the details of which are quite similar to those 
of Jackson s case as related by Avis Everhard. 



CHAPTER V 

THE PHILOMATHS 

ERNEST was often at the house. Nor was it my 
father, merely, nor the controversial dinners, that drew 
him there. Even at that time I flattered myself that 
I played some part in causing his visits, and it was not 
long before I learned the correctness of my surmise. 
For never was there such a lover as Ernest Everhard. 
His gaze and his hand-clasp grew firmer and steadier, 
if that were possible ; and the question that had grown 
from the first in his eyes, grew only the more imperative. 

My impression of him, the first time I saw him, had 
been unfavorable. Then I had found myself attracted 
toward him. Next came my repulsion, when he so 
savagely attacked my class and me. After that, as I 
saw that he had not maligned my class, and that the 
harsh and bitter things he said about it were justified, 
I had drawn closer to him again. He became my 
oracle. For me he tore the sham from the face of 
society and gave me glimpses of reality that were as 
unpleasant as they were undeniably true. 

As I have said, there was never such a lover as he. 
No girl could live in a university town till she was 
twenty-four and not have love experiences. I had 
been made love to by beardless sophomores and gray 

71 



72 THE IRON HEEL 

professors, and by the athletes and the football giants. 
But not one of them made love to me as Ernest did. 
His arms were around me before I knew. His lips were 
on mine before I could protest or resist. Before his 
earnestness conventional maiden dignity was ridiculous. 
He swept me off my feet by the splendid invincible 
rush of him. He did not propose. He put his arms 
around me and kissed me and took it for granted that 
we should be married. There was no discussion about 
it. The only discussion and that arose afterward 
was when we should be married. 

It was unprecedented. It was unreal. Yet, in 
accordance with Ernest s test of truth, it worked. I 
trusted my life to it. And fortunate was the trust. 
Yet during those first days of our love, fear of the 
future came often to me when I thought of the violence 
and impetuosity of his love-making. Yet such fears 
were groundless. No woman was ever blessed with a 
gentler, tenderer husband. This gentleness and vio 
lence on his part was a curious blend similar to the one 
in his carriage of awkwardness and ease. That slight 
awkwardness ! He never got over it, and it was de 
licious. His behavior in our drawing-room reminded 
me of a careful bull in a china shop. 1 

1 In those days it was still the custom to fill the living rooms with 
bric-a-brac. They had not discovered simplicity of living. Such 
rooms were museums, entailing endless labor to keep clean. The 
dust-demon was the lord of the household. There were a myriad de 
vices for catching dust, and only a few devices for getting rid of it. 



THE PHILOMATHS 73 

It was at this time that vanished my last doubt of 
the completeness of my love for him (a subconscious 
doubt, at most). It was at the Philomath Club a 
wonderful night of battle, wherein Ernest bearded the 
masters in their lair. Now the Philomath Club was 
the most select on the Pacific Coast. It was the crea 
tion of Miss Brentwood, an enormously wealthy old 
maid; and it was her husband, and family, and toy. 
Its members were the wealthiest in the community, 
and the strongest-minded of the wealthy, with, of 
course, a sprinkling of scholars to give it intellectual 
tone. 

The Philomath had no club house. It was not that 
kind of a club. Once a month its members gathered 
at some one of their private houses to listen to a lecture. 
The lecturers were usually, though not always, hired. 
If a chemist in New York made a new discovery in say 
radium, all his expenses across the continent were paid, 
and as well he received a princely fee for his time. 
The same with a returning explorer from the polar 
regions, or the latest literary or artistic success. No 
visitors were allowed, while it was the Philomath s 
policy to permit none of its discussions to get into the 
papers. Thus great statesmen and there had been 
such occasions were able fully to speak their minds. 

I spread before me a wrinkled letter, written to me 
by Ernest twenty years ago, and from it I copy the 
following : 



74 THE IRON HEEL 

"Your father is a member of the Philomath, so you 
are able to come. Therefore come next Tuesday night. 
I promise you that you will have the time of your life. 
In your recent encounters, you failed to shake the 
masters. If you come, I ll shake them for you. I ll 
make them snarl like wolves. You merely questioned 
their morality. When their morality is questioned, 
they grow only the more complacent and superior. 
But I shall menace their money-bags. That will 
shake them to the roots of their primitive natures. 
If you can come, you will see the cave-man, in evening 
dress, snarling and snapping over a bone. I promise 
you a great caterwauling and an illuminating insight 
into the nature of the beast. 

"They ve invited me in order to tear me to pieces. 
This is the idea of Miss Brentwood. She clumsily 
hinted as much when she invited me. She s given them 
that kind of fun before. They delight in getting trust- 
ful-souled gentle reformers before them. Miss Brent- 
wood thinks I am as mild as a kitten and as good- 
natured and stolid as the family cow. I ll not deny that 
I helped to give her that impression. She was very 
tentative at first, until she divined my harmlessness. 
I am to receive a handsome fee two hundred and 
fifty dollars as befits the man who, though a radical, 
once ran for governor. Also, I am to wear evening 
dress. This is compulsory. I never was so apparelled 
in my life. I suppose I ll have to hire one somewhere. 



THE PHILOMATHS 75 

But I d do more than that to get a chance at the 
Philomaths." 

Of all places, the Club gathered that night at the 
Pertonwaithe house. Extra chairs had been brought 
into the great drawing-room, and in all there must have 
been two hundred Philomaths that sat down to hear 
Ernest. They were truly lords of society. I amused 
myself with running over in my mind the sum of the 
fortunes represented, and it ran well into the hundreds 
of millions. And the possessors were not of the idle 
rich. They were men of affairs who took most active 
parts in industrial and political life. 

We were all seated when Miss Brentwood brought 
Ernest in. They moved at once to the head of the 
room, from where he was to speak. He was in evening 
dress, and, what of his broad shoulders and kingly head, 
he looked magnificent. And then there was that faint 
and unmistakable touch of awkwardness in his move 
ments. I almost think I could have loved him for 
that alone. And as I looked at him. I was aware of a 
great joy. I felt again the pulse of his palm on mine, 
the touch of his lips; and such pride was mine that 
I felt I must rise up and cry out to the assembled 
company: "He is mine! He has held me in his 
arms, and I, mere I, have filled that mind of his to 
the exclusion of all his multitudinous and kingly 
thoughts!" 

At the head of the room, Miss Brentwood introduced 



76 THE IRON HEEL 

him to Colonel Van Gilbert, and I knew that the latter 
was to preside. Colonel Van Gilbert was a great cor 
poration lawyer. In addition, he was immensely 
wealthy. The smallest fee he would deign to notice 
was a hundred thousand dollars. He was a master of 
law. The law was a puppet with which he played. 
He moulded it like clay, twisted and distorted it like 
a Chinese puzzle into any design he chose. In appear 
ance and rhetoric he was old-fashioned, but in imagina 
tion and knowledge and resource he was as young a3 
the latest statute. His first prominence had come 
when he broke the Shard well will. 1 His fee for this 
one act was five hundred thousand dollars. From 
then on he had risen like a rocket. He was often 
called the greatest lawyer in the country corporation 
lawyer, of course; and no classification of the three 
greatest lawyers in the United States could have ex 
cluded him. 

He arose and began, in a few well-chosen phrases that 

1 This breaking of wills was a peculiar feature of the period. With 
the accumulation of vast fortunes, the problem of disposing of these 
fortunes after death was a vexing one to the accumulators. Will- 
making and will-breaking became complementary trades, like armor- 
making and gun-making. The shrewdest will-making lawyers were 
called in to make wills that could not be broken. But these wills 
were always broken, and very often by the very lawyers that had 
drawn them up. Nevertheless the delusion persisted in the wealthy 
class that an absolutely unbreakable will could be cast; and so, 
through the generations, clients and lawyers pursued the illusion. 
It was a pursuit like unto that of the Universal Solvent of the mediaeval 
alchemist*. 



THE PHILOMATHS 77 

carried an undertone of faint irony, to introduce 
Ernest. Colonel Van Gilbert was subtly facetious in 
his introduction of the social reformer and member of 
the working class, and the audience smiled. It made 
me angry, and I glanced at Ernest. The sight of him 
made me doubly angry. He did not seem to resent 
the delicate slurs. Worse than that, he did not seem 
to be aware of them. There he sat, gentle, and stolid, 
and somnolent. He really looked stupid. And for a 
moment the thought rose in my mind, What if he were 
overawed by this imposing array of power and brains ? 
Then I smiled. He couldn t fool me. But he fooled 
the others, just as he had fooled Miss Brentwood. 
She occupied a chair right up to the front, and several 
times she turned her head toward one or another of 
her confreres and smiled her appreciation of the re 
marks. 

Colonel Van Gilbert done, Ernest arose and began 
to speak. He began in a low voice, haltingly and 
modestly, and with an air of evident embarrassment. 
He spoke of his birth in the working class, and of the 
sordidness and wretchedness of his environment, where 
flesh and spirit were alike starved and tormented. He 
described his ambitions and ideals, and his conception 
of the paradise wherein lived the people of the upper 
classes. As he said : 

"Up above me, I knew, were unselfishnesses of the 
spirit, clean and noble thinking, keen intellectual living. 



78 THE IRON HEEL 

I knew all this because I read Seaside Library 1 
novels, in which, with the exception of the villains and 
adventuresses, all men and women thought beautiful 
thoughts, spoke a beautiful tongue, and performed glo 
rious deeds. In short, as I accepted the rising of the 
sun, I accepted that up above me was all that was fine 
and noble and gracious, all that gave decency and dig 
nity to life, all that made life worth living and that 
remunerated one for his travail and misery." 

He went on and traced his life in the mills, the 
learning of the horseshoeing trade, and his meeting 
with the socialists. Among them, he said, he had 
found keen intellects and brilliant wits, ministers of 
the Gospel who had been broken because their Chris 
tianity was too wide for any congregation of mammon- 
worshippers, and professors who had been broken on 
the wheel of university subservience to the ruling class. 
The socialists were revolutionists, he said, struggling 
to overthrow the irrational society of the present and 
out of the material to build the rational society of the 
future. Much more he said that would take too long 
to write, but I shall never forget how he described the 
life among the revolutionists. All halting utterance 
vanished. His voice grew strong and confident, and 
it glowed as he glowed, and as the thoughts glowed that 
poured out from him. He said : 

1 A curious and amazing literature that served to make the working 
class utterly misapprehend the nature of the leisure class. 



THE PHILOMATHS 79 

"Amongst the revolutionists I found, also, warm 
faith in the human, ardent idealism, sweetnesses of 
unselfishness, renunciation, and martyrdom all the 
splendid, stinging things of the spirit. Here life was 
clean, noble, and alive. I was in touch with great 
souls who exalted flesh and spirit over dollars and cents, 
and to whom the thin wail of the starved slum child 
meant more than all the pomp and circumstance of 
commercial expansion and world empire. All about 
me were nobleness of purpose and heroism of effort, 
and my days and nights were sunshine and starshine, 
all fire and dew, with before my eyes, ever burning and 
blazing, the Holy Grail, Christ s own Grail, the warm 
human, long-suffering and maltreated but to be rescued 
and saved at the last." 

As before I had seen him transfigured, so now he 
stood transfigured before me. His brows were bright 
with the divine that was in him, and brighter yet shone 
his eyes from the midst of the radiance that seemed 
to envelop him as a mantle. But the others did not 
see this radiance, and I assumed that it was due to the 
tears of joy and love that dimmed my vision. At any 
rate, Mr. Wickson, w T ho sat behind me, was unaffected, 
for I heard him sneer aloud, " Utopian." 

1 The people of that age were phrase slaves. The abjectness of 
their servitude is incomprehensible to us. There was a magic in 
words greater than the conjurer s art. So befuddled and chaotic 
were their minds that the utterance of a single word could negative 
the generalizations of a lif etime of serious research and thought. Such 



80 THE IRON HEEL 

Ernest went on to his rise in society, till at last he 
came in touch with members of the upper classes, and 
rubbed shoulders with the men who sat in the high 
places. Then came his disillusionment, and this dis 
illusionment he described in terms that did not flatter 
his audience. He was surprised at the commonness 
of the clay. Life proved not to be fine and gracious. 
He was appalled by the selfishness he encountered, 
and what had surprised him even more than that was 
the absence of intellectual life. Fresh from his revo 
lutionists, he was shocked by the intellectual stupidity 
of the master class. And then, in spite of their magnifi 
cent churches and well-paid preachers, he had found 
the masters, men and women, grossly material. It was 
true that they prattled sweet little ideals and dear little 
moralities, but in spite of their prattle the dominant 
key of the life they lived was materialistic. And they 
were without real morality for instance, that which 
Christ had preached but which was no longer preached. 

"I met men," he said, "who invoked the name of 
the Prince of Peace in their diatribes against war, and 
who put rifles in the hands of Pinkertons 1 with which 

a word was the adjective Utopian. The mere utterance of it could 
damn any scheme, no matter how sanely conceived, of economic 
amelioration or regeneration. Vast populations grew frenzied over 
Buch phrases as "an honest dollar" and "a full dinner pail." The 
coinage of such phrases was considered strokes of genius. 

1 Originally, they were private detectives ; but they quickly be 
came hired fighting men of the capitalists, and ultimately developed 
into the Mercenaries of the Oligarchy. 



THE PHILOMATHS 81 

to shoot down strikers in their own factories. I met 
men incoherent with indignation at the brutality of 
prize-fighting, and who, at the same time, were parties 
to the adulteration of food that killed each year more 
babes than even red-handed Herod had killed. 

"This delicate, aristocratic-featured gentleman was 
a dummy director and a tool of corporations that se 
cretly robbed widows and orphans. This gentleman, 
who collected fine editions and was a patron of litera 
ture, paid blackmail to a heavy-jo wled, black-browed 
boss of a municipal machine. This editor, who pub 
lished patent medicine advertisements, called me a 
scoundrelly demagogue because I dared him to print 
in his paper the truth about patent medicines. 1 This 
man, talking soberly and earnestly about the beauties 
of idealism and the goodness of God, had just betrayed 
his comrades in a business deal. This man, a pillar of 
the church and heavy contributor to foreign missions, 
worked his shop girls ten hours a day on a starvation 
wage and thereby directly encouraged prostitution. 
This man, who endowed chairs in universities and 
erected magnificent chapels, perjured himself in courts 
of law over dollars and cents. This railroad magnate 
broke his word as a citizen, as a gentleman, and as a 
Christian, when he granted a secret rebate, and he 

1 Patent medicines were patent lies, but, like the charms and indul 
gences of the Middle Ages, they deceived the people. The only differ 
ence lay in that the patent medicines were more harmful and more 
costly. 



82 THE IRON HEEL 

granted many secret rebates. This senator was 
the tool and the slave, the little puppet, of a brutal 
uneducated machine boss ; i so was this governor and 
this supreme court judge; and all three rode on rail 
road passes ; and, also, this sleek capitalist owned the 
machine, the machine boss, and the railroads that 
issued the passes. 

"And so it was, instead of in paradise, that I found 
myself in the arid desert of commercialism. I found 
nothing but stupidity, except for business. I found 
none clean, noble, and alive, though I found many who 
were alive with rottenness. What I did find was 
monstrous selfishness and heartlessness, and a gross, 
gluttonous, practised, and practical materialism." 

Much more Ernest told them of themselves and of 
his disillusionment. Intellectually they had bored 
him ; morally and spiritually they had sickened him ; 
so that he was glad to go back to his revolutionists, 
who were clean, noble, and alive, and all that the capital 
ists were not. 

"And now," he said, "let me tell you about that 
revolution." 

But first I must say that his terrible diatribe had 

1 Even as late as 1912, A.D., the great mass of the people still per 
sisted in the belief that they ruled the country by virtue of their bal 
lots. In reality, the country was ruled by what were called political 
machines. At first the machine bosses charged the master capitalists 
extortionate tolls for legislation ; but in a short time the master capi 
talists found it cheaper to own the political machines themselves and 
to hire the machine bosses. 



THE PHILOMATHS 83 

not touched them. I looked about me at their faces 
and saw that they remained complacently superior to 
what he had charged. And I remembered what he 
had told me: that no indictment of their morality 
could shake them. However, I could see that the 
boldness of his language had affected Miss Brentwood. 
She was looking worried and apprehensive. 

Ejnest began by describing the army of revolution, 
and as he gave the figures of its strength (the votes cast 
in the various countries), the assemblage began to 
grow restless. Concern showed in their faces, and I 
noticed a tightening of lips. At last the gage of 
battle had been thrown down. He described the 
international organization of the socialists that united 
the million and a half in the United States with the 
twenty-three millions and a half in the rest of the 
world. 

"Such an army of revolution," he said, "twenty-five 
millions strong, is a thing to make rulers and ruling 
classes pause and consider. The cry of this army is: 
No quarter ! We want all that you possess. We will 
be content with nothing less than all that you possess. 
We want in our hands the reins of power and the 
destiny of mankind. Here are our hands. They are 
strong hands. We are going to take your governments, 
your palaces, and all your purpled ease away from you, 
and in that day you shall work for your bread even as 
the peasant in the field or the starved and runty clerk 



84 THE IRON HEEL 

in your metropolises. Here are our hands. They are 
strong hands ! 

And as he spoke he extended from his splendid shoul 
ders his two great arms, and the horseshoer s hands were 
{ clutching the air like eagle s talons. He was the spirit 
of regnant labor as he stood there, his hands outreach- 
ing to rend and crush his audience. I was aware of a 
faintly perceptible shrinking on the part of the listeners 
before this figure of revolution, concrete, potential, and 
menacing. That is, the women shrank, and fear was 
in their faces. Not so with the men. They were of 
the active rich, and not the idle, and they were fighters. 
A low, throaty rumble arose, lingered on the air a 
moment, and ceased. It was the forerunner of the 
"snarl, and I was to hear it many times that night 
the token of the brute in man, the earnest of his primi 
tive passions. And they were unconscious that they 
had made this sound. It was the growl of the pack, 
mouthed by the pack, and mouthed in all unconscious 
ness. And in that moment, as I saw the harshness form 
in their faces and saw the fight-light flashing in their 
eyes, I realized that not easily would they let their 
lordship of the world be wrested from them. 

Ernest proceeded with his attack. He accounted 
for the existence of the million and a half of revolu 
tionists in the United States by charging the capitalist 
class with having mismanaged society. He sketched 
the economic condition of the cave-man and of the 



THE PHILOMATHS 85 

savage peoples of to-day, pointing out that they pos 
sessed neither tools nor machines, and possessed only 
a natural efficiency of one in producing power. Then 
he traced the development of machinery and social 
organization so that to-day the producing power of 
civilized man was a thousand times greater than that 
of the savage. 

"ive men/ he said, "can produce bread for a 
thousand. One man can produce cotton cloth for two 
hundred and fifty people, woollens for three hundred, 
and boots and shoes for a thousand. One would con 
clude from this that under a capable management of 
society modern civilized man would be a great deal 
better off than the cave-man. But is he? Let us see. 
In the United States to-day there are fifteen million * 
people living in poverty ; and by poverty is meant that 
condition in life in which, through lack of food and 
adequate shelter, the mere standard of working effi 
ciency cannot be maintained. In the United States 
to-day, in spite of all your so-called labor legislation, 
there are three millions of child laborers. 2 In twelve 
years their numbers have been doubled. And in pass 
ing I will ask you managers of society why you did 



1 Robert Hunter, in 1906, in a book entitled " Poverty," pointed 
out that at that time there were ten millions in the United States liv 
ing in poverty. 

2 In the United States Census of 1900 (the last census the figures 
of which were made public), tiie number of child laborers was placed 
at 1,752,187. 



86 THE IRON HEEL 

not make public the census figures of 1910? And I 
will answer for you, that you were afraid. The figures 
of misery would have precipitated the revolution that 
even now is gathering. 

"But to return to my indictment. If modern 
man s producing power is a thousand times greater 
than that of the cave-man, why then, in the United 
States to-day, are there fifteen million people who are 
not properly sheltered and properly fed? Why then, 
in the United States to-day, are there three million 
child laborers? It is a true indictment. The capital 
ist class has mismanaged. In face of the facts that 
modern man lives more wretchedly than the cave-man, 
and that his producing power is a thousand times 
greater than that of the cave-man, no other conclu 
sion is possible than that the capitalist class has mis 
managed, that you have mismanaged, my masters, 
that you have criminally and selfishly mismanaged. 
And on this count you cannot answer me here to-night, 
face to face, any more than can your whole class 
answer the million and a half of revolutionists in the 
United States. You cannot answer. I challenge 
you to answer. And furthermore, I dare to say to you 
now that when I have finished you will not answer. 
On that point you will be tongue-tied, though you will 
talk wordily enough about other things. 

"You have failed in your management. You have 
made a shambles of civilization. You have been blind 



THE PHILOMATHS 87 

and greedy. You have risen up (as you to-day rise 
up), shamelessly, in our legislative halls, and declared 
that profits were impossible without the toil of children 
and babes. Don t take my word for it. It is all in the 
records against you. You have lulled your conscience 
to sleep with prattle of sweet ideals and dear moralities. 
You are fat with power and possession, drunken with 
success; and you have no more hope against us than 
have the drones, clustered about the honey-vats, when 
the worker-bees spring upon them to end their rotund 
existence. You have failed in your management of 
society, and your management is to be taken away 
from you. A million and a half of the men of the work 
ing class say that they are going to get the rest of the 
working class to join with them and take the manage 
ment away from you. This is the revolution, my mas 
ters. Stop it if you can." 

For an appreciable lapse of time Ernest s voice 
continued to ring through the great room. Then arose 
the throaty rumble I had heard before, and a dozen 
men were on their feet clamoring for recognition from 
Colonel Van Gilbert. I noticed Miss Brent wood s 
shoulders moving convulsively, and for the moment 
I was angry, for I thought that she was laughing at 
Ernest. And then I discovered that it was not laugh 
ter, but hysteria. She was appalled by what she had 
done in bringing this firebrand before her blessed Philo 
math Club. 



88 THE IRON HEEL 

Colonel Van Gilbert did not notice the dozen men, 
with passion-wrought faces, who strove to get per 
mission from him to speak. His own face was passion- 
wrought. He sprang to his feet, waving his arms, and 
for a moment could utter only incoherent sounds. Then 
speech poured from him. But it was not the speech of 
a one-hundred-thousand-dollar lawyer, nor was the 
rhetoric old-fashioned. 

"Fallacy upon fallacy!" he cried. "Never in all 
my life have I heard so many fallacies uttered in one 
short hour. And besides, young man, I must tell you 
that you have said nothing new. I learned all that at 
college before you were born. Jean Jacques Rousseau 
enunciated your socialistic theory nearly two centuries 
ago. A return to the soil, forsooth ! Reversion ! Our 
biology teaches the absurdity of it. It has been truly 
said that a little learning is a dangerous thing, and you 
have exemplified it to-night with your madcap theories. 
Fallacy upon fallacy ! I was never so nauseated in my 
life with overplus of fallacy. That for your immature 
generalizations and childish reasonings!" 

He snapped his fingers contemptuously and proceeded 
to sit down. There were lip-exclamations of approval 
on the part of the women, and hoarser notes of con 
firmation carne from the men. As for the dozen men 
who were clamoring for the floor, half of them began 
speaking at once. The confusion and babel was in 
describable. Never had Mrs. Pertonwaithe s spacious 



walls beheld such a spectacle. These, then, were the 

cool captains of industry and lords of society, these 

snarling, growling savages in evening clothes. Truly 

Ernest had shaken them when he stretched out his 

. hands for their money-bags, his hands that had ap- 

" peared in their eyes as the hands of the fifteen hundred 

thousand revolutionists. 

BuJ; Ernest never lost his head in a situation. Before 
Colonel Van Gilbert had succeeded in sitting down, 
Ernest was on his feet and had sprung forward. 

"One at a time!" he roared at them. 

The sound arose from his great lungs and dominated 
the human tempest. By sheer compulsion of personal 
ity he commanded silence. 

"One at a time," he repeated softly. "Let me an 
swer Colonel Van Gilbert. After that the rest of you 
can come at me but one at a time, remember. No 
mass-plays here. This is not a football field. 

"As for you," he went on, turning toward Colonel 
Van Gilbert, "you have replied to nothing I have said. 
You have merely made a few excited and dogmatic 
assertions about my mental caliber. That may serve 
you in your business, but you can t talk to me like 
that. I am not a workingman, cap in hand, asking 
you to increase my wages or to protect me from the 
machine at which I work. You cannot be dogmatic 
with truth when you deal with me. Save that for 
dealing with your wage-slaves. They will not dare 



90 THE IRON HEEL 

reply to you because you hold their bread and butter, 
their lives, in your hands. 

"As for this return to nature that you say you 
learned at college before I was born, permit me to 
point out that on the face of it you cannot have learned 
anything since. Socialism has no more to do with the 
state of nature than has differential calculus with a 
Bible class. I have called your class stupid when out 
side the realm of business. You, sir, have brilliantly 
exemplified my statement." 

This terrible castigation of her hundred-thousand- 
dollar lawyer was too much for Miss Brentwood s 
nerves. Her hysteria became violent, and she was 
helped, weeping and laughing, out of the room. It was 
just as well, for there was worse to follow. 

" Don t take my word for it," Ernest continued, 
when the interruption had been led away. "Your 
own authorities with one unanimous voice will prove 
you stupid. Your own hired purveyors of knowledge 
will tell you that you are wrong. Go to your meekest 
little assistant instructor of sociology and ask him 
what is the difference between Rousseau s theory of 
the return to nature and the theory of socialism; ask 
your greatest orthodox bourgeois political economists 
and sociologists ; question through the pages of every 
text-book written on the subject and stored on the 
shelves of your subsidized libraries ; and from one and 
all the answer will be that there is nothing congruous 



THE PHILOMATHS 91 

between the return to nature and socialism. On the 
other hand, the unanimous affirmative answer will be 
that the return to nature and socialism are diametri 
cally opposed to each other. As I say, don t take my 
word for it. The record of your stupidity is there in 
the books, your own books that you never read. And 
so far as your stupidity is concerned, you are but the 
exemplar of your class. 

"Yo*u know law and business, Colonel Van Gilbert. 
You know how to serve corporations and increase 
dividends by twisting the law. Very good. Stick to 
it. You are quite a figure. You are a very good 
lawyer, but you are a poor historian, you know noth 
ing of sociology, and your biology is contemporaneous 
with Pliny." 

Here Colonel Van Gilbert writhed in his chair. 
There was perfect quiet in the room. Everybody sat 
fascinated paralyzed, I may say. Such fearful 
treatment of the great Colonel Van Gilbert was unheard 
of, undreamed of, impossible to believe the great 
Colonel Van Gilbert before whom judges trembled 
when he arose in court. But Ernest never gave quar 
ter to an enemy. 

"This is, of course, no reflection on you," Ernest said. 
"Every man to his trade. Only you stick to your 
trade, and I ll stick to mine. You have specialized. 
When it comes to a knowledge of the law, of how best 
to evade the law or make new law for the benefit of 



92 THE IRON HEEL 

thieving corporations, I am down in the dirt at your 
feet. But when it comes to sociology my trade 
you are down in the dirt at my feet. Remember that. 
Remember, also, that your law is the stuff of a day, and 
that you are not versatile in the stuff of more than a 
day. Therefore your dogmatic assertions and rash 
generalizations on things historical and sociological 
are not worth the breath you waste on them." 

Ernest paused for a moment and regarded him 
thoughtfully, noting his face dark and twisted with 
anger, his panting chest, his writhing body, and his 
slim white hands nervously clenching and unclench 
ing. 

"But it seems you have breath to use, and I ll give 
you a chance to use it. I indicted your class. Show 
me that my indictment is wrong. I pointed out to 
you the wretchedness of modern man three million 
child slaves in the United States, without whose labor 
profits would not be possible, and fifteen million under 
fed, ill-clothed, and worse-housed people. I pointed 
out that modern man s producing power through social 
organization and the use of machinery was a thousand 
times greater than that of the cave-man. And I stated 
that from these two facts no other conclusion was pos 
sible than that the capitalist class had mismanaged. 
This was my indictment, and I specifically and at length 
challenged you to answer it. Nay, I did more. I 
prophesied that you would not answer. It remains 



THE PHILOMATHS 93 

for your breath to smash my prophecy. You called 
my speech fallacy. Show the fallacy, Colonel Van 
Gilbert. Answer the indictment that I and my fifteen 
hundred thousand comrades have brought against 
your class and you." 

Colonel Van Gilbert quite forgot that he was presid 
ing, and that in courtesy he should permit the other 
clamojiers to speak. He was on his feet, flinging his 
arms, his rhetoric, and his control to the winds, alter 
nately abusing Ernest for his youth and demagoguery, 
and savagely attacking the working class, elaborating 
its inefficiency and worthlessness. 

"For a lawyer, you are the hardest man to keep to 
a point I ever saw," Ernest began his answer to the 
tirade. "My youth has nothing to do with what I 
have enunciated. Nor has the worthlessness of the 
working class. I charged the capitalist class with 
having mismanaged society. You have not answered. 
You have made no attempt to answer. Why? Is it 
because you have no answer? You are the champion 
of this whole audience. Every one here, except me, 
is hanging on your lips for that answer. They are 
hanging on your lips for that answer because they have 
no answer themselves. As for me, as I said before, I 
know that you not only cannot answer, but that you 
will not attempt an answer." 

" This is intolerable !" Colonel Van Gilbert cried out. 
"This is insult!" 



94 THE IRON HEEL 

"That you should not answer is intolerable," Ernest 
replied gravely. "No man can be intellectually in 
sulted. Insult, in its very nature, is emotional. Re 
cover yourself. Give me an intellectual answer to my 
intellectual charge that the capitalist class has mis 
managed society." 

Colonel Van Gilbert remained silent, a sullen, 
superior expression on his face, such as will appear 
on the face of a man who will not bandy words with 
a ruffian. 

"Do not be downcast," Ernest said. "Take con 
solation in the fact that no member of your class has 
ever yet answered that charge." He turned to the 
other men who were anxious to speak. "And now it s 
your chance. Fire away, and do not forget that I 
here challenge you to give the answer that Colonel 
Van Gilbert has failed to give." 

It would be impossible for me to write all that was 
said in the discussion. I never realized before how 
many words could be spoken in three short hours. 
At any rate, it was glorious. The more his opponents 
grew excited, the more Ernest deliberately excited 
them. He had an encyclopaedic command of the field 
of knowledge, and by a word or a phrase, by delicate 
rapier thrusts, he punctured them. He named the 
points of their illogic. This was a false syllogism, that 
conclusion had no connection with the premise, while 
that next premise was an impostor because it had cun- 



THE PHILOMATHS 95 

ningly hidden in it the conclusion that was being 
attempted to be proved. This was an error, that was 
an assumption, and the next was an assertion contrary 
to ascertained truth as printed in all the text-books. 

And so it went. Sometimes he exchanged the rapier 
for the club and went smashing amongst their thoughts 
right and left. And always he demanded facts and 
refused to discuss theories. And his facts made for 
them a Waterloo. When they attacked the working 
class, he always retorted, "The pot calling the kettle 
black ; that is no answer to the charge that your own 
face is dirty." And to one and all he said: "Why 
have you not answered the charge that your class has 
mismanaged? You have talked about other things 
and things concerning other things, but you have not 
answered. Is it because you have no answer?" 

It was at the end of the discussion that Mr. Wickson 
spoke. He was the only one that was cool, and Ernest 
treated him with a respect he had not accorded the 
others. 

"No answer is necessary," Mr. Wickson said with 
slow deliberation. "I have followed the whole dis 
cussion with amazement and disgust. I am disgusted 
with you, gentlemen, members of my class. You 
have behaved like foolish little schoolboys, what with 
intruding ethics and the thunder of the common poli 
tician into such a discussion. You have been out- 
generalled and outclassed. You have been very wordy t 



96 THE IRON HEEL 

and all you have done is buzz. You have buzzed like 
gnats about a bear. Gentlemen, there stands the 
bear" (he pointed at Ernest), "and your buzzing has 
only tickled his ears. 

"Believe me, the situation is serious. That bear 
reached out his paws to-night to crush us. He has said 
there are a million and a half of revolutionists in the 
United States. That is a fact. He has said that it 
is their intention to take away from us our govern 
ments, our palaces, and all our purpled ease. That, 
also, is a fact. A change, a great change, is coming 
in society; but, haply, it may not be the change the 
bear anticipates. The bear has said that he will crush 
us. What if we crush the bear?" 

The throat-rumble arose in the great room, and 
man nodded to man with indorsement and certitude. 
Their faces were set hard. They were fighters, that 
was certain. 

"But not by buzzing will we crush the bear," Mr. 
Wickson went on coldly and dispassionately. "We* 
will hunt the bear. We will not reply to the bear in 
words. Our reply shall be couched in terms of lead. 
We are in power. Nobody will deny it. By virtue 
of that power we shall remain in power." 

He turned suddenly upon Ernest. The moment was 
dramatic. 

"This, then, is our answer. We have no words to 
waste on you. When you reach out your vaunted 



THE PHILOMATHS 97 

strong hands for our palaces and purpled ease, we will 
show you what strength is. In roar of shell and shrap 
nel and in whine of machine-guns will our answer be 
couched. 1 We will grind you revolutionists down 
under our heel, and we shall walk upon your faces. 
The world is ours, we are its lords, and ours it shall 
remain. As for the host of labor, it has been in the 
dirt since history began, and I read history aright. 
AncJ, in the dirt it shall remain so long as I and mine 
and those that come after us have the power. There 
is the word. It is the king of words Power. Not 
God, not Mammon, but Power. Pour it over your 
tongue till it tingles with it. Power." 

"I am answered," Ernest said quietly. "It is the 
only answer that could be given. Power. It is what 
we of the working class preach. We know, and well 
we know by bitter experience, that no appeal for the 
right, for justice, for humanity, can ever touch you. 
Your hearts are hard as your heels with which you 
tread upon the faces of the poor. So we have preached 
power. By the power of our ballots on election day 
will we take your government away from you 

"What if you do get a majority, a sweeping majority, 
on election day ? " Mr. Wickson broke in to demand. 

1 To show the tenor of thought, the following definition is quoted 
from "The Cynic s Word Book" (1906 A.D.), written by one Ambrose 
Bierce, an avowed and confirmed misanthrope of the period : " Grape- 
shot, n. An argument which the future is preparing in answer to th, 
demands of American Socialism." 

H 



98 THE IRON HEEL 

"Suppose we refuse to turn the government over 
to you after you have captured it at the ballot- 
box?" 

"That, also, have we considered," Ernest replied. 
"And we shall give you an answer in terms of lead. 
Power, you have proclaimed the king of words. 
Very good. Power it shall be. And in the day that 
we sweep to victory at the ballot-box, and you refuse 
to turn over to us the government we have constitu 
tionally and peacefully captured, and you demand 
what we are going to do about it in that day, 
I say, we shall answer you ; and in roar of shell and 
shrapnel and in whine of machine-guns shall our answer 
be couched. 

"You cannot escape us. It is true that you have 
read history aright. It is true that labor has from the 
beginning of history been in the dirt. And it is equally 
true that so long as you and yours and those that come 
after you have power, that labor shall remain in the 
dirt. I agree with you. I agree with all that you 
have said. Power will be the arbiter, as it always has 
been the arbiter. It is a struggle of classes. Just as 
your class dragged down the old feudal nobility, so 
shall it be dragged down by my class, the working 
class. If you will read your biology and your sociology 
as clearly as you do your history, you will see that this 
end I have described is inevitable. It does not matter 
whether it is in one year, ten, or a thousand your class 



THE PHILOMATHS 99 

shall be dragged down. And it shall be done by power. 
We of the labor hosts have conned that word over till 
our minds are all a-tingle with it. Power. It is a 
kingly word." 
And so ended the night with the Philomaths. 



CHAPTER VI 

ADUMBRATIONS 

IT was about this time that the warnings of coming 
events began to fall about us thick and fast. Ernest 
had already questioned father s policy of having 
socialists and labor leaders at his house, and of openly 
attending socialist meetings; and father had only 
laughed at him for his pains. As for myself, I was 
learning much from this contact with the working- 
class leaders and thinkers. I was seeing the other side 
of the shield. I was delighted with the unselfishness 
and high idealism I encountered, though I was appalled 
by the vast philosophic and scientific literature of 
socialism that was opened up to me. I was learning 
fast, but I learned not fast enough to realize then the 
peril of our position. 

There were warnings, but I did not heed them. For 
instance, Mrs. Pertonwaithe and Mrs. Wickson exer 
cised tremendous social power in the university town, 
and from them emanated the sentiment that I was a too- 
forward and self-assertive young woman with a mis 
chievous penchant for ofnciousness and interference 

100 



ADUMBRATIONS 101 

in other persons affairs. This I thought no more than 
natural, considering the part I had played in investi 
gating the case of Jackson s arm. But the effect of 
such a sentiment, enunciated by two such powerful 
social arbiters, I underestimated. 

True, I noticed a certain aloofness on the part of 
my general friends, but this I ascribed to the dis 
approval that was prevalent in my circles of my in 
terfiled marriage with Ernest. It was not till some 
time afterward that Ernest pointed out to me clearly 
that this general attitude of my class was something 
more than spontaneous, that behind it were the hidden 
springs of an organized conduct. "You have given 
shelter to an enemy of your class," he said. "And 
not alone shelter, for you have given your love, your 
self. This is treason to your class. Think not that 
you will escape being penalized." 

But it was before this that father returned one after 
noon. Ernest was with me, and we / could see that 
father was angry philosophically angry. He was 
rarely really angry ; but a certain measure of controlled 
anger he allowed himself. He called it a tonic. And 
we could see that he was tonic-angry when he entered 
the room. 

"What do you think?" he demanded. "I had 
luncheon with Wilcox." 

Wilcox was the superannuated president of the 
university, whose withered mind was stored with 



102 THE IRON HEEL 

generalizations that were young in 1870, and which 
he had since failed to revise. 

"I was invited," father announced. "I was sent 
for." 

He paused, and we waited. 

"Oh, it was done very nicely, I ll allow; but I was 
reprimanded. I ! And by that old fossil !" 

"I ll wager I know what you were reprimanded for," 
Ernest said. 

"Not in three guesses," father laughed. 

"One guess will do," Ernest retorted. "And it 
won t be a guess. It will be a deduction. You were 
reprimanded for your private life." 

"The very thing!" father cried. "How did you 
guess ? " 

"I knew it was coming. I warned you before about 
it." 

"Yes, you did," father meditated. "But I couldn t 
believe it. At any rate, it is only so much more clinch 
ing evidence for my book." 

"It is nothing to what will come," Ernest went on, 
"if you persist in your policy of having these socialists 
and radicals of all sorts at your house, myself included." 

"Just what old Wilcox said. And of all unwarranted 
things ! He said it was in poor taste, utterly profitless, 
anyway, and not in harmony with university traditions 
and policy. He said much more of the same vague 
sort, and I couldn t pin him down to anything specific. 



ADUMBRATIONS 103 

I made it pretty awkward for him, and he could only 
go on repeating himself and telling me how much he 
honored me, and all the world honored me, as a scien 
tist. It wasn t an agreeable task for him. I could see 
he didn t like it." 

"He was not a free agent," Ernest said. "The 
leg-bar l is not always worn graciously." 

"Yes. I got that much out of him. He said the 
f 
university needed ever so much more money this year 

than the state was willing to furnish ; and that it must 
come from wealthy personages who could not but be 
offended by the swerving of the university from its 
high ideal of the passionless pursuit of passionless intel 
ligence. When I tried to pin him down to what my 
home life had to do with swerving the university from 
its high ideal, he offered me a two years vacation, on 
full pay, in Europe, for recreation and research. Of 
course I couldn t accept it under the circumstances." 

"It would have been far better if you had," Ernest 
said gravely. 

"It was a bribe," father protested; and Ernest 
nodded. 

"Also, the beggar said that there was talk, tea-table 
gossip and so forth, about my daughter being seen in 
public with so notorious a character as you, and that 

1 Leg-bar the African slaves were so manacled ; also criminals. 
It was not until the coming of the Brotherhood of Man that the leg- 
bar passed out of use. 



104 THE IRON HEEL 

it was not in keeping with university tone and dignity. 
Not that he personally objected oh, no; but that 
there was talk and that I would understand." 

Ernest considered this announcement for a moment, 
and then said, and his face was very grave, withal there 
was a sombre wrath in it : 

11 There is more behind this than a mere university 
ideal. Somebody has put pressure on President 
Wilcox." 

"Do you think so?" father asked, and his face 
showed that he was interested rather than frightened. 

"I wish I could convey to you the conception that 
is dimly forming in my own mind," Ernest said. 
" Never in the history of the world was society in so 
terrific flux as it is right now. The swift changes in 
our industrial system are causing equally swift changes 
in our religious, political, and social structures. An 
unseen and fearful revolution is taking place in the 
fibre and structure of society. One can only dimly 
feel these things. But they are in the air, now, to-day. 
One can feel the loom of them things vast, vague, 
and terrible. My mind recoils from contemplation of 
what they may crystallize into. You heard Wickson 
talk the other night. Behind what he said were the 
same nameless, formless things that I feel. He spoke 
out of a superconscious apprehension of them." 

"You mean . . . ?" father began, then paused. 

"I mean that there is a shadow of something colossal 



ADUMBRATIONS 105 

and menacing that even now is beginning to fall across 
the land. Call it the shadow of an oligarchy, if you 
will ; it is the nearest I dare approximate it. What its 
nature may be I refuse to imagine. 1 But what I wanted 
to say was this : You are in a perilous position a peril 
that my own fear enhances because I am not able even 
to measure it. Take my advice and accept the vaca 
tion." 

"*But it would be cowardly/ was the protest. 

"Not at all. You are an old man. You have done 
your work in the world, and a great work. Leave the 
present battle to youth and strength. We young 
fellows have our work yet to do. Avis will stand by 
my side in what is to come. She will be your repre 
sentative in the battle-front." 

"But they can t hurt me," father objected. "Thank 
God I am independent. Oh, I assure you, I know the 
frightful persecution they can wage on a professor who 
is economically dependent on his university. But I 

1 Though, like Everhard, they did not dream of the nature of it, 
there were men, even before his time, who caught glimpses of the 
shadow. John C. Calhoun said : " A power has risen up in the govern 
ment greater than the people themselves, consisting of many and various 
and powerful interests, combined into one mass, and held together by the 
cohesive power of the vast surplus in the banks." And that great hu 
manist, Abraham Lincoln, said, just before his assassination: "/ 
see in the near future a crisis approaching that unnerves me and causes 
me to tremble for the safety of my country. . . . Corporations have been 
enthroned, an era of corruption in high places will follow, and the money- 
power of the country will endeavor to prolong its reign by working upon 
the prejudices of the people until the wealth is aggregated in a few hands 
and the Republic t* destroyed." 



106 THE IRON HEEL 

am independent. I have not been a professor for the 
sake of my salary. I can get along very comfortably 
on my own income, and the salary is all they can take 
away from me." 

"But you do not realize," Ernest answered. "If 
all that I fear be so, your private income, your principal 
itself, can be taken from you just as easily as your 
salary." 

Father was silent for a few minutes. He was think 
ing deeply, and I could see the lines of decision forming 
in his face. At last he spoke. 

"I shall not take the vacation." He paused again. 
"I shall go on with my book. 1 You may be wrong, 
but whether you are wrong or right, I shall stand by 
my guns." 

"All right," Ernest said. "You are travelling the 
same path that Bishop Morehouse is, and toward a 
similar smash-up. You ll both be proletarians before 
you re done with it." 

The conversation turned upon the Bishop, and we 
got Ernest to explain what he had been doing with him. 

1 This book, " Economics and Education," was published in that 
year. Three copies of it are extant; two at Ardis, and one at As- 
gard. It dealt, in elaborate detail, with one factor in the persistence 
of the established, namely, the capitalistic bias of the universities 
and common schools. It was a logical and crushing indictment of the 
whole system of education that developed in the minds of the students 
only such ideas as were favorable to the capitalistic r6gime, to the 
exclusion of all ideas that were inimical and subversive. The book 
created a furor, and was promptly suppressed by the Oligarchy. 



ADUMBRATIONS 107 

"He is soul-sick from the journey through hell I 
have given him. I took him through the homes of a 
few of our factory workers. I showed him the human 
wrecks cast aside by the industrial machine, and he 
listened to their life stories. I took him through the 
slums of San Francisco, and in drunkenness, prostitu 
tion, and criminality he learned a deeper cause than 
innate depravity. He is very sick, and, worse than 
thai;, he has got out of hand. He is too ethical. He 
has been too severely touched. And, as usual, he is 
unpractical. He is up in the air with all kinds of ethical 
delusions and plans for mission work among the cul 
tured. He feels it is his bounden duty to resurrect the 
ancient spirit of the Church and to deliver its message 
to the masters. He is overwrought. Sooner or later 
he is going to break out, and then there s going to be 
a smash-up. What form it will take I can t even guess. 
He is a pure, exalted soul, but he is so unpractical. 
He s beyond me. I can t keep his feet on the earth. 
And through the air he is rushing on to his Gethsemane. 
And after this his crucifixion. Such high souls are made 
for crucifixion." 

"And you?" I asked; and beneath my smile was 
the seriousness of the anxiety of love. 

"Not I," he laughed back. "I may be executed, or 
assassinated, but I shall never be crucified. I am 
planted too solidly and stolidly upon the earth." 

"But why should you bring about the crucifixion of 



108 THE IRON HEEL 

the Bishop?" I asked. "You will not deny that you 
are the cause of it." 

"Why should I leave one comfortable soul in com 
fort when there are millions in travail and misery?" 
he demanded back. 

"Then why did you advise father to accept the vaca 
tion?" 

"Because I am not a pure, exalted soul," was the 
answer. "Because I am solid and stolid and selfish. 
Because I love you and, like Ruth of old, thy people are 
my people. As for the Bishop, he has no daughter. 
Besides, no matter how small the good, nevertheless 
his little inadequate wail will be productive of some 
good in the revolution, and every little bit counts." 

I could not agree with Ernest. I knew well the 
noble nature of Bishop Morehouse, and I could not 
conceive that his voice raised for righteousness would 
be no more than a little inadequate wail. But I did 
not yet have the harsh facts of life at my ringers ends 
as Ernest had. He saw clearly the futility of the 
Bishop s great soul, as coming events were soon to 
show as clearly to me. 

It was shortly after this day that Ernest told me, as 
a good story, the offer he had received from the govern 
ment, namely, an appointment as United States Com 
missioner of Labor. I was overjoyed. The salary 
was comparatively large, and would make safe our 
marriage. And then it surely was congenial work for 



ADUMBRATIONS 109 

Ernest, and, furthermore, my jealous pride in him made 
me hail the proffered appointment as a recognition of 
his abilities. 

Then I noticed the twinkle in his eyes. He was 
laughing at me. 

"You are not going to ... to decline?" I quavered. 

"It is a bribe," he said. " Behind it is the fine hand 
of Wickson, and behind him the hands of greater men 
thafi he. It is an old trick, old as the class struggle is 
old stealing the captains from the army of labor. 
Poor betrayed labor! If you but knew how many of 
its leaders have been bought out in similar ways in the 
past. It is cheaper, so much cheaper, to buy a general 
than to fight him and his whole army. There was 
but I ll not call any names. I m bitter enough over 
it as it is. Dear heart, I am a captain of labor. I could 
not sell out. If for no other reason, the memory of 
my poor old father and the way he was worked to death 
would prevent." 

The tears were in his eyes, this great, strong hero of 
mine. He never could forgive the way his father had 
been malformed the sordid lies and the petty thefts 
he had been compelled to, in order to put food in his 
children s mouths. 

"My father was a good man," Ernest once said to 
me. "The soul of him was good, and yet it was twisted, 
and maimed, and blunted by the savagery of his life. 
He was made into a broken-down beast by his masters, 



110 THE IRON HEEL 

the arch-beasts. He should be alive to-day, like your 
father. He had a strong constitution. But he was 
caught in the machine and worked to death for 
profit. Think of it. For profit his life blood trans 
muted into a wine-supper, or a jewelled gewgaw, or 
some similar sense-orgy of the parasitic and idle rich, 
his masters, the arch-beasts." 



CHAPTER VII 

THE BISHOP S VISION 

Bishop is out of hand," Ernest wrote me. 
"He is clear up in the air. To-night he is going to 
begin putting to rights this very miserable world of 
ours*. He is going to deliver his message. He has 
told me so, and I cannot dissuade him. To-night 
he is chairman of the I. P. H., and he will embody his 
message in his introductory remarks. 

"May I bring you to hear him? Of course, he is 
foredoomed to futility. It will break your heart - 
it will break his; but for you it will be an excellent 
object lesson. You know, dear heart, how proud I am 
because you love me. And because of that I want you 
to know my fullest value, I want to redeem, in your 
eyes, some small measure of my unworthiness. And 
so it is that my pride desires that you shall know my 
thinking is correct and right. My views are harsh; 
the futility of so noble a soul as the Bishop will show you 
the compulsion for such harshness. So come to-night. 
Sad though this night s happening will be, I feel that it 
will but draw you more closely to me." 

The I. P. H. 1 held its convention that night in San 

1 There is no clew to the name of the organization for which these 
initials stand. 

Ill 



112 THE IRON HEEL 

Francisco. 1 This convention had been called to con 
sider public immorality and the remedy for it. Bishop 
Morehouse presided. He was very nervous as he sat 
on the platform, and I could see the high tension he was 
under. By his side were Bishop Dickinson; H. H. 
Jones, the head of the ethical department in the Uni 
versity of California; Mrs. W. W. Hurd, the great 
charity organizer; Philip Ward, the equally great 
philanthropist; and several lesser luminaries in the 
field of morality and charity. Bishop Morehouse arose 
and abruptly began : 

"I was in my brougham, driving through the streets. 
It was night-time. Now and then I looked through 
the carriage windows, and suddenly my eyes seemed to 
be opened, and I saw things as they really are. At first 
I covered my eyes with my hands to shut out the 
awful sight, and then, in the darkness, the question 
came to me : What is to be done ? What is to be done ? 
A little later the question came to me in another way :j 
What would the Master do? And with the question 
a great light seemed to fill the place, and I saw my duty 
sun-clear, as Saul saw his on the way to Damascus. 

"I stopped the carriage, got out, and, after a few 
minutes conversation, persuaded two of the public 
women to get into the brougham with me. If Jesus 

1 It took but a few minutes to cross by ferry from Berkeley to San 
Francisco. These, and the other bay cities, practically composed one 
community. 



THE BISHOP S VISION 113 

I 

was right, then these two unfortunates were my sisters, 

and the only hope of their purification was in my 
affection and tenderness. 

"I live in one of the loveliest localities of San Fran 
cisco. The house in which I live cost a hundred thou 
sand dollars, and its furnishings, books, and works of 
art cost as much more. The house is a mansion. 
No, it is a palace, wherein there are many servants. I 
never knew what palaces were good for. I had thought 
they were to live in. But now I know. I took the 
two women of the street to my palace, and they are 
going to stay with me. I hope to fill every room in my 
palace with such sisters as they." 

The audience had been growing more and more 
restless and unsettled, and the faces of those that sat 
on the platform had been betraying greater and greater 
dismay and consternation. And at this point Bishop 
Dickinson arose, and, with an expression of disgust 
on his face, fled from the platform and the hall. But , 
Bishop Morehouse, oblivious to all, his eyes filled with * 
his vision, continued: 

"Oh, sisters and brothers, in this act of mine I find 
the solution of all my difficulties. I didn t know what 
broughams were made for, but now I know. They are 
made to carry the weak, the sick, and the aged ; they 
are made to show honor to those who have lost the 
sense even of shame. 

"I did not know what palaces were made for, but 



114 THE IRON HEEL 

now I have found a use for them. The palaces of the 
Church should be hospitals and nurseries for those 
who have fallen by the wayside and are perishing." 

He made a long pause, plainly overcome by the 
thought that was in him, and nervous how best to 
express it. 

"I am not fit, dear brethren, to tell you anything 
about morality. I have lived in shame and hypocrisies 
too long to be able to help others ; but my action with 
those women, sisters of mine, shows me that the better 
way is easy to find. To those who believe in Jesus and 
his gospel there can be no other relation between man 
and man than the relation of affection. Love alone is 
stronger than sin stronger than death. I therefore 
say to the rich among you that it is their duty to do 
what I have done and am doing. Let each one of you 
who is prosperous take into his house some thief and 
treat him as his brother, some unfortunate and treat 
her as his sister, and San Francisco will need no police 
force and no magistrates ; the prisons will be turned 
into hospitals, and the criminal will disappear with his 
crime. 

"We must give ourselves and not our money alone. 
We must do as Christ did ; that is the message of the 
Church to-day. We have wandered far from the 
Master s teaching. We are consumed in our own flesh- 
pots. We have put mammon in the place of Christ. 
I have here a poem that tells the whole story. I should 



THE BISHOP S VISION 115 

like to read it to you. It was written by an erring soul 
who yet saw clearly. 1 It must not be mistaken for an 
attack upon the Catholic Church. It is an attack upon 
all churches, upon the pomp and splendor of all churches 
that have wandered from, the Master s path and hedged 
themselves in from his lambs. Here it is: 

"The silver trumpets rang across the Dome; 
^ The people knelt upon the ground with awe; 

And borne upon the necks of men I saw, 
Like some great God, the Holy Lord of Rome. 

"Priest-like, he wore a robe more white than foam, 
And, king-like, swathed himself in royal red, 
Three crowns of gold rose high upon his head ; 
In splendor and in light the Pope passed home. 

" My heart stole back across wide wastes of years 

To One who wandered by a lonely sea; 
And sought in vain for any place of rest: 
Foxes have holes, and every bird its nest, 

I, only I, must wander wearily, 
And bruise my feet, and drink wine salt with tears. " 

The audience was agitated, but unresponsive. Yet 
Bishop Morehouse was not aware of it. He held 
steadily on his way. 

"And so I say to the rich among you, and to all the 
rich, that bitterly you oppress the Master s lambs. 
You have hardened your hearts. You have closed your 
ears to the voices that are crying in the land the 

1 Oscar Wilde, one of the lords of language of the nineteenth cen 
tury of the Christian Era. 



116 THE IRON HEEL 

voices of pain and sorrow that you will not hear but 
that some day will be heard. And so I say " 

But at this point H. H. Jones and Philip Ward, who 
had already risen from their chairs, led the Bishop off 
the platform, while the audience sat breathless and 
shocked. 

Ernest laughed harshly and savagely when he had 
gained the street. His laughter jarred upon me. My 
heart seemed ready to burst with suppressed tears. 

"He has delivered his message," Ernest cried. "The 
manhood and the deep-hidden, tender nature of their 
Bishop burst out, and his Christian audience, that loved 
him, concluded that he was crazy ! Did you see them 
leading him so solicitously from the platform? There 
must have been laughter in hell at the spectacle." 

"Nevertheless, it will make a great impression, what 
the Bishop did and said to-night," I said. 

"Think so?" Ernest queried mockingly. 

"It will make a sensation," I asserted. "Didn t you 
see the reporters scribbling like mad while he was 
speaking?" 

"Not a line of which will appear in to-morrow s 
papers." 

"I can t believe it," I cried. 

"Just wait and see," was the answer. "Not a line, 
not a thought that he uttered. The daily press? The 
daily suppressage !" 

"But the reporters," I objected. "I saw them." 



THE BISHOP S VISION 117 

"Not a word that he uttered will see print. You 
have forgotten the editors. They draw their salaries 
for the policy they maintain. Their policy is to print 
nothing that is a vital menace to the established. The 
Bishop s utterance was a violent assault upon the 
established morality. It was heresy. They led him 
from the platform to prevent him from uttering more 
heresy. The newspapers will purge his heresy in the 
oblivion of silence. The press of the United States? 
It is a parasitic growth that battens on the capitalist 
class. Its function is to serve the established by 
moulding public opinion, and right well it serves it. 

"Let me prophesy. To-morrow s papers will merely 
mention that the Bishop is in poor health, that he has 
been working too hard, and that he broke down last 
night. The next mention, some days hence, will be 
to the effect that he is suffering from nervous prostra 
tion and has been given a vacation by his grateful flock. 
After that, one of two things will happen : either the 
Bishop will see the error of his way and return from 
his vacation a well man in whose eyes there are no 
more visions, or else he will persist in his madness, 
and then you may expect to see in the papers, couched 
pathetically and tenderly, the announcement of his 
insanity. After that he will be left to gibber his 
visions to padded walls." 

"Now there you go too far!" I cried out. 

"In the eyes of society it will truly be insanity," he 



118 THE IRON HEEL 

replied. "What honest man, who is not insane, would 
take lost women and thieves into his house to dwell 
with him sisterly and brotherly? True, Christ died 
between two thieves, but that is another story. In 
sanity ? The mental processes of the man with whom 
one disagrees, are always wrong. Therefore the mind 
of the man is wrong. Where is the line between wrong 
mind and insane mind? It is inconceivable that any 
sane man can radically disagree with one s most sane 
conclusions. 

"There is a good example of it in this evening s 
paper. Mary McKenna lives south of Market Street. 
She is a poor but honest woman. She is also patriotic. 
But she has erroneous ideas concerning the American 
flag and the protection it is supposed to symbolize. 
And here s what happened to her. Her husband had 
an accident and was laid up in hospital three months. 
In spite of taking in washing, she got behind in her 
rent. Yesterday they evicted her. But first, she 
hoisted an American flag, and from under its folds she 
announced that by virtue of its protection they could 
not turn her out on to the cold street. What was done ? 
She was arrested and arraigned for insanity. To-day 
she was examined by the regular insanity experts. 
She was found insane. She was consigned to the 
Napa Asylum." 

"But that is far-fetched," I objected. "Suppose I 
should disagree with everybody about the literary style 



THE BISHOP S VISION 119 

of a book. They wouldn t send me to an asylum for 
that." 

"Very true," he replied. "But such divergence of 
opinion would constitute no menace to society. Therein 
lies the difference. The divergence of opinion on the 
parts of Mary McKenna and the Bishop do menace 
society. What if all the poor people should refuse to 
pay. rent and shelter themselves under the American 
flag ? Landlordism would go crumbling. The Bishop s 
views are just as perilous to society. Ergo, to the 
asylum with him." 

But still I refused to believe. 

"Wait and see," Ernest said, and I waited. 

Next morning I sent out for all the papers. So far 
Ernest was right. Not a word that Bishop Morehouse 
had uttered was in print. Mention was made in one or 
two of the papers that he had been overcome by his 
feelings. Yet the platitudes of the speakers that fol 
lowed him were reported at length. 

Several days later the brief announcement was made 
that he had gone away on a vacation to recover from 
the effects of overwork. So far so good, but there had 
been no hint of insanity, nor even of nervous collapse. 
Little did I dream the terrible road the Bishop was 
destined to travel the Gethsemane and crucifixion 
that Ernest had pondered about. 



CHAPTER VIII 

THB MACHINE BREAKERS 

IT was just before Ernest ran for Congress, on the 
socialist ticket, that father gave what he privately 
called his " Pro fit and Loss" dinner. Ernest called it 
the dinner of the Machine Breakers. In point of fact, 
it was merely a dinner for business men small 
business men, of course. I doubt if one of them was 
interested in any business the total capitalization of 
which exceeded a couple of hundred thousand dollars. 
They were truly representative middle-class business 
men. 

There was Owen, of Silverberg, Owen & Company 
a large grocery firm with several branch stores. We 
bought our groceries from them. There were both 
partners of the big drug firm of Kowalt & Washburn, 
and Mr. Asmunsen, the owner of a large granite quarry 
in Contra Costa County. And there were many similar 
men, owners or part-owners in small factories, small 
businesses and small industries small capitalists, 
in short. 

They were shrewd-faced, interesting men, and they 

120 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 121 

talked with simplicity and clearness. Their unani 
mous complaint was against the corporations and trusts. 
Their creed was, "Bust the Trusts." All oppression 
originated in the trusts, and one and all told the same 
tale of woe. They advocated government ownership 
of such trusts as the railroads and telegraphs, and 
excessive income taxes, graduated with ferocity, to 
destrov large accumulations. Likewise they advo- 

P 

cated, as a cure for local ills, municipal ownership of 
such public utilities as water, gas, telephones, and 
street railways. 

Especially interesting was Mr. Asmunsen s narrative 
of his tribulations as a quarry owner. He confessed 
that he never made any profits out of his quarry, and 
this, in spite of the enormous volume of business that 
had been caused by the destruction of San Francisco 
by the big earthquake. For six years the rebuilding 
of San Francisco had been going on, and his business 
had quadrupled and octupled, and yet he wr^s no better 
off. 

"The railroad knows my business just a little bit 
better than I do," he said. "It knows my operating 
expenses to a cent, and it knows the terms of my con 
tracts. How it knows these things I can only guess. 
It must have spies in my employ, and it must have 
access to the parties to all my contracts. For look 
you, when I place a big contract, the terms of which 
favor me a goodly profit, the freight rate from my 



122 THE IRON HEEL 

quarry to market is promptly raised. No explanation 
is made. The railroad gets my profit. Under such 
circumstances I have never succeeded in getting the 
railroad to reconsider its raise. On the other hand, 
when there have been accidents, increased expenses of 
operating, or contracts with less profitable terms, I 
have always succeeded in getting the railroad to lower 
its rate. What is the result? Large or small, the 
railroad always gets my profits." 

"What remains to you over and above," Ernest 
interrupted to ask, " would roughly be the equivalent 
of your salary as a manager did the railroad own the 
quarry." 

"The very thing," Mr. Asmunsen replied. "Only 
a short time ago I had my books gone through for the 
past ten years. I discovered that for those ten years 
my gain was just equivalent to a manager s salary. 
The railroad might just as well have owned my quarry 
and hired me to run it." 

"But with this difference," Ernest laughed; "the 
railroad would have had to assume all the risk which 
you so obligingly assumed for it." 

"Very true," Mr. Asmunsen answered sadly. 

Having let them have their say, Ernest began asking 
questions right and left. He began with Mr. Owen. 

"You started a branch store here in Berkeley about 
six months ago?" 

"Yes," Mr. Owen answered. 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 123 

"And since then I ve noticed that three little corner 
groceries have gone out of business. Was your branch 
store the cause of it?" 

Mr. Owen affirmed with a complacent smile. "They 
had no chance against us." 

" Why not?" 

"We had greater capital. With a large business 
there is always less waste and greater efficiency." 

"&nd your branch store absorbed the profits of the 
three small ones. I see. But tell me, what became 
of the owners of the three stores?" 

"One is driving a delivery wagon for us. I don t 
know what happened to the other two." 

Ernest turned abruptly on Mr. Kowalt. 

"You sell a great deal at cut-rates. 1 What have 
become of the owners of the small drug stores that you 
forced to the wall?" 

"One of them, Mr. Haasfurther, has charge now of 
our prescription department," was the answer. 

"And you absorbed the profits they had been mak- 
ing?" 

"Surely. That is what we are in business for." 

"And you?" Ernest said suddenly to Mr. Asmunsen. 
"You are disgusted because the railroad has absorbed 
your profits?" 

1 A lowering of selling price to cost, and even to less than cost. 
Thus, a large company could sell at a loss for a longer period than a 
Email company, and so drive the small company out of business. A 
common device of competition. 



124 THE IRON HEEL 

Mr. Asmunsen nodded. 

"What you want is to make profits yourself?" 

Again Mr. Asmunsen nodded. 

"Out of others?" 

There was no answer. 

"Out of others?" Ernest insisted. 

"That is the way profits are made/ Mr. Asmunsen 
replied curtly. 

"Then the business game is to make profits out of 
others, and to prevent others from making profits out 
of you. That s it, isn t it ? " 

Ernest had to repeat his question before Mr. Asmun 
sen gave an answer, and then he said : 

"Yes, that s it, except that we do not object to the 
others making profits so long as they are not extor 
tionate." 

"By extortionate you mean large ; yet you do not ob 
ject to making large profits yourself? . . . Surely not ?" 

And Mr. Asmunsen amiably confessed to the weak 
ness. There was one other man who was quizzed by 
Ernest at this juncture, a Mr. Calvin, who had once 
been a great dairy-owner. 

"Some time ago you were fighting the Milk Trust," 
Ernest said to him; "and now you are in Grange poli 
tics. 1 How did it happen?" 

1 Many efforts were made during this period to organize the perish 
ing farmer class into a political party, the aim of which was to destroy 
the trusts and corporations by drastic legislation. All such attempts 
ended in failure. 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 125 

"Oh, I haven t quit the fight/ Mr. Calvin answered, 
and he looked belligerent enough. "I m fighting the 
Trust on the only field where it is possible to fight 
the political field. Let me show you. A few years ago 
we dairymen had everything our own way." 

"But you competed among yourselves?" Ernest 
interrupted. 

"Yes, that was what kept the profits down. We 
did try to organize, but independent dairymen always 
broke through us. Then came the Milk Trust." 

"Financed by surplus capital from Standard Oil," l 
Ernest said. 

"Yes," Mr. Calvin acknowledged. "But we did 
not know it at the time. Its agents approached us 
with a club. Come in and be fat, was their proposi 
tion, or stay out and starve. Most of us came in. 
Those that didn t, starved. Oh, it paid us ... at first. 
Milk was raised a cent a quart. One-quarter of this 
cent came to us. Three-quarters of it went to the 
Trust. Then milk was raised another cent, only we 
didn t get any of that cent. Our complaints were use 
less. The Trust was in control. We discovered that 
we were pawns. Finally, the additional quarter of a 
cent was denied us. Then the Trust began to squeeze 
us out. What could we do? We were squeezed out. 
There were no dairymen, only a Milk Trust." 

1 The first successful great trust almost a generation in advance 
of the rest. 



126 THE IRON HEEL 

"But with milk two cents higher, I should think 
you could have competed," Ernest suggested slyly. 

"So we thought. We tried it." Mr. Calvin paused 
a moment. "It broke us. The Trust could put milk 
upon the market more cheaply than we. It could sell 
still at a slight profit when we were selling at actual 
loss. I dropped fifty thousand dollars in that venture. 
Most of us went bankrupt. 1 The dairymen were wiped 
out of existence." 

"So the Trust took your profits away from you," 
Ernest said, "and you ve gone into politics in order to 
legislate the Trust out of existence and get the profits 
back?" 

Mr. Calvin s face lighted up. "That is precisely 
what I say in my speeches to the farmers. That s our 
whole idea in a nutshell." 

"And yet the Trust produces milk more cheaply 
than could the independent dairymen?" Ernest 
queried. 

"Why shouldn t it, with the splendid organization 
and new machinery its large capital makes possible?" 

"There is no discussion," Ernest answered. "It 
certainly should, and, furthermore, it does." 

Mr. Calvin here launched out into a political speech 
in exposition of his views. He was warmly followed by 

1 Bankruptcy a peculiar institution that enabled an individual, 
who had failed in competitive industry, to forego paying his debts. 
The effect was to ameliorate the too savage conditions of the fang- 
and-claw social struggle. 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 127 

a number of the others, and the cry of all was to destroy 
the trusts. 

"Poor simple folk," Ernest said to me in an under 
tone. "They see clearly as far as they see, but they 
see only to the ends of their noses." 

A little later he got the floor again, and in his charac 
teristic way controlled it for the rest of the evening. 

"I have listened carefully to all of you," he began, 
"and I see plainly that you play the business game in 
the orthodox fashion. Life sums itself up to you in 
profits. You have a firm and abiding belief that you 
were created for the sole purpose of making profits. 
Only there is a hitch. In the midst of your own profit- 
making along comes the trust and takes your profits 
away from you. This is a dilemma that interferes 
somehow with the aim of creation, and the only way 
out, as it seems to you, is to destroy that which takes 
from you your profits. 

"I have listened carefully, and there is only one name 
that will epitomize you. I shall call you that name. 
You are machine-breakers. Do you know what a 
machine-breaker is? Let me tell you. In the eigh 
teenth century, in England, men and women wove 
cloth on hand-looms in their own cottages. It was a 
slow, clumsy, and costly way of weaving cloth, this 
cottage system of manufacture. Along came the steam- 
engine and labor-saving machinery. A thousand looms 
assembled in a large factory, and driven by a central 



128 THE IRON HEEL 

engine wove cloth vastly more cheaply than could the 
cottage weavers on their hand-looms. Here in the 
factory was combination, and before it competition 
faded away. The men and women who had worked 
the hand-looms for themselves now went into the fac 
tories and worked the machine-looms, not for them 
selves, but for the capitalist owners. Furthermore, 
little children went to work on the machine-looms, at 
lower wages, and displaced the men. This made hard 
times for the men. Their standard of living fell. They 
starved. And they said it was all the fault of the 
machines. Therefore they proceeded to break the 
machines. They did not succeed, and they were very 
stupid. 

"Yet you have not learned their lesson. Here are 
you, a century and a half later, trying to break machines. 
By your own confession the trust machines do the work 
more efficiently and more cheaply than you can. That 
is why you cannot compete with them. And yet you 
would break those machines. You are even more 
stupid than the stupid workmen of England. And 
while you maunder about restoring competition, the 
trusts go on destroying you. 

"One and all you tell the same story, the passing 
away of competition and the coming on of combination. 
You, Mr. Owen, destroyed competition here in Berkeley 
when your branch store drove the three small groceries 
out of business. Your combination was more effective. 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 129 

Yet you feel the pressure of other combinations on you, 
the trust combinations, and you cry out. It is because 
you are not a trust. If you were a grocery trust for 
the whole United States, you would be singing another 
song. And the song would be, Blessed are the trusts. 
And yet again, not only is your small combination not 
a trust, but you are aware yourself of its lack of strength. 
You are beginning to divine your own end. You feel 
yourself and your branch stores a pawn in the game. 
You see the powerful interests rising and growing more 
powerful day by day; you feel their mailed hands 
descending upon your profits and taking a pinch here 
and a pinch there the railroad trust, the oil trust, 
the steel trust, the coal trust; and you know that in 
the end they will destroy you, take away from you the 
last per cent of your little profits. 

" You, sir, are a poor gamester. When you squeezed 
out the three small groceries here in Berkeley by virtue 
of your superior combination, you swelled out your 
chest, talked about efficiency and enterprise, and sent 
your wife to Europe on the profits you had gained by 
eating up the three small groceries. It is dog eat dog, 
and you ate them up. But, on the other hand, you 
are being eaten up in turn by the bigger dogs, wherefore 
you squeal. And what I say to you is true of all of you 
at this table. You are all squealing. You are all play 
ing the losing game, and you are all squealing about it. 

"But when you squeal you don t state the situation 



130 THE IRON HEEL 

flatly, as I have stated it. You don t say that you like 
to squeeze profits out of others, and that you are mak 
ing all the row because others are squeezing your profits 
out of you. No, you are too cunning for that. You 
say something else. You make small-capitalist political 
speeches such as Mr. Calvin made. What did he say? 
Here are a few of his phrases I caught: Our original 
principles are all right/ What this country requires 
is a return to fundamental American methods free 
opportunity for all/ The spirit of liberty in which 
this nation was born/ Let us return to the principles 
of our forefathers. 

"When he says free opportunity for all/ he means 
free opportunity to squeeze profits, which freedom of 
opportunity is now denied him by the great trusts. 
And the absurd thing about it is that you have repeated 
these phrases so often that you believe them. You 
want opportunity to plunder your fellow-men in your 
own small way, but you hypnotize yourselves into 
thinking you want freedom. You are piggish and ac 
quisitive, but the magic of your phrases leads you to 
believe that you are patriotic. Your desire for profits, 
which is sheer selfishness, you metamorphose into 
altruistic solicitude for suffering humanity. Come on 
now, right here amongst ourselves, and be honest for 
once. Look the matter in the face and state it in direct 
terms." 

There were flushed and angry faces at the table, and 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 131 

withal a measure of awe. They were a little frightened 
at this smooth-faced young fellow, and the swing and 
smash of his words, and his dreadful trait of calling a 
spade a spade. Mr. Calvin promptly replied. 

"And why not?" he demanded. "Why can we not 
return to the ways of our fathers when this republic 
was founded ? You have spoken much truth, Mr. Ever- 
hard, unpalatable though it has been. But here 
amongst ourselves let us speak out. Let us throw off all 
disguise and accept the truth as Mr. Everhard has flatly 
stated it. It is true that we smaller capitalists are 
after profits, and that the trusts are taking our profits 
away from us. It is true that we want to destroy the 
trusts in order that our profits may remain to us. And 
why can we not do it? Why not? I say, why not?" 

"Ah, now we come to the gist of the matter/ 7 Ernest 
said with a pleased expression. "I ll try to tell you 
why not, though the telling will be rather hard. You 
see, you fellows have studied business, in a small way, 
but you have not studied social evolution at all. You 
are in the midst of a transition stage now in economic 
evolution, but you do not understand it, and that s 
what causes all the confusion. Why cannot you 
return? Because you can t. You can no more make 
water run up hill than can you cause the tide of economic 
evolution to flow back in its channel along the way it 
came. Joshua made the sun stand still upon Gibeon, 
but you would outdo Joshua. You would make the 



132 THE IRON HEEL 

sun go backward in the sky. You would have time 
retrace its steps from noon to morning. 

"In the face of labor-saving machinery, of organized 
production, of the increased efficiency of combination, 
y you would set the economic sun back a whole genera 
tion or so to the time when there were no great capi 
talists, no great machinery, no railroads a time 
when a host of little capitalists warred with each other 
in economic anarchy, and when production was primi 
tive, wasteful, unorganized, and costly. Believe me, 
Joshua s task was easier, and he had Jehovah to help 
him. But God has forsaken you small capitalists. 
The sun of the small capitalists is setting. It will never 
rise again. Nor is it in your power even to make it 
stand still. You are perishing, and you are doomed to 
perish utterly from the face of society. 

"This is the fiat of evolution. It is the word of God. 
Combination is stronger than competition. Primitive 
man was a puny creature hiding in the crevices of the 
rocks. He combined and made war upon his carniv 
orous enemies. They were competitive beasts. Primi 
tive man was a combinative beast, and because of it he 
rose to primacy over all the animals. And man has 
been achieving greater and greater combinations ever 
since. It is combination versus competition, a thou 
sand centuries long struggle, in which competition has 
always been worsted. Whoso enlists on the side of 
competition perishes." 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 133 

"But the trusts themselves arose out of competition," 
Mr. Calvin interrupted. 

"Very true," Ernest answered. "And the trusts 
themselves destroyed competition. That, by your own 
word, is why you are no longer in the dairy business." 

The first laughter of the evening went around the 
table, and even Mr. Calvin joined in the laugh against 
himself. 

"And now, while we are on the trusts," Ernest went 
on, "let us settle a few things. I shall make certain 
statements, and if you disagree with them, speak up. 
Silence will mean agreement. Is it not true that a 
machine-loom will weave more cloth and weave more 
cheaply than a hand-loom?" He paused, but nobody 
spoke up. "Is it not then highly irrational to break 
the machine-loom and go back to the clumsy and more 
costly hand-loom method of weaving ? " Heads nodded 
in acquiescence. "Is it not true that that combination 
known as a trust produces more efficiently and cheaply 
than can a thousand competing small concerns?" 
Still no one objected. "Then is it not irrational to 
destroy that cheap and efficient combination?" 

No one answered for a long time. Then Mr. Kowalt 
spoke. 

"What are we to do, then?" he demanded. "To 
destroy the trusts is the only way we can see to escape 
their domination." 

Ernest was all fire and aliveness on the instant. 



134 THE IRON HEEL 

"I ll show you another way!" he cried. "Let us 
not destroy those wonderful machines that produce 
efficiently and cheaply. Let us control them. Let us 
profit by their efficiency and cheapness. Let us run 
them for ourselves. Let us oust the present owners of 
the wonderful machines, and let us own the wonderful 
machines ourselves. That, gentlemen, is socialism, a 
greater combination than the trusts, a greater economic 
and social combination than any that has as yet ap 
peared on the planet. It is in line with evolution. 
We meet combination with greater combination. It 
is the winning side. Come on over with us socialists 
and play on the winning side." 

Here arose dissent. There was a shaking of heads, 
and mutterings arose. 

"All right, then, you prefer to be anachronisms," 
Ernest laughed. "You prefer to play atavistic roles. 
You are doomed to perish as all atavisms perish. Have 
you ever asked what will happen to you when greater 
combinations than even the present trusts arise? 
Have you ever considered where you will stand when 
the great trusts themselves combine into the com 
bination of combinations into the social, economic, 
and political trust?" 

He turned abruptly and irrelevantly upon Mr. Calvin. 

"Tell me," Ernest said, "if this is not true. You are 
compelled to form a new political party because the 
old parties are in the hands of the trusts. The chief 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 135 

obstacle to your Grange propaganda is the trusts. 
Behind every obstacle you encounter, every blow that 
smites you, every defeat that you receive, is the hand 
of the trusts. Is this not so? Tell me." 

Mr. Calvin sat in uncomfortable silence. 

"Go ahead/ Ernest encouraged. 

"It is true, "Mr. Calvin confessed. "We captured the 
state legislature of Oregon and put through splendid 
protective legislation, and it was vetoed by the gov 
ernor, who was a creature of the trusts. We elected a 
governor of Colorado, and the legislature refused to 
permit him to take office. Twice we have passed a 
national income tax, and each time the supreme 
court smashed it as unconstitutional. The courts are 
in the hands of the trusts. We, the people, do not pay 
our judges sufficiently. But there will come a time " 

"When the combination of the trusts will control 
all legislation, when the combination of the trusts will 
itself be the government," Ernest interrupted. 

"Never! never!" were the cries that arose. Every 
body was excited and belligerent. 

"Tell me," Ernest demanded, "what will you do 
when such a time comes?" 

"We will rise in our strength !" Mr. Asmunsen cried, 
and many voices backed his decision. 

"That will be civil war," Ernest warned them. 

"So be it, civil war," was Mr. Asmunsen s answer, 
with the cries of all the men at the table behind him. 



136 THE IRON HEEL 

"We have not forgotten the deeds of our forefathers. 
For our liberties we are ready to fight and die." 

Ernest smiled. 

"Do not forget/ he said, "that we had tacitly 
agreed that liberty in your case, gentlemen, means 
liberty to squeeze profits out of others." 

The table was angry, now, fighting angry ; but Ernest 
controlled the tumult and made himself heard. 

"One more question. When you rise in your 
strength, remember, the reason for your rising will be 
that the government is in the hands of the trusts. 
Therefore, against your strength the government will 
turn the regular army, the navy, the militia, the police 
in short, the whole organized war machinery of the 
United States. Where will your strength be then?" 

Dismay sat on their faces, and before they could 
recover, Ernest struck again. 

"Do you remember, not so long ago, when our regular 
army was only fifty thousand ? Year by year it has been 
increased until to-day it is three hundred thousand." 

Again he struck. 

"Nor is that all. While you diligently pursued that 
favorite phantom of yours, called profits, and moralized 
about that favorite fetich of yours, called competition, 
even greater and more direful things have been accom 
plished by combination. There is the militia." 

"It is our strength!" cried Mr. Kowalt. "With it 
we would repel the invasion of the regular army." 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 137 

"You would go into the militia yourself," was 
Ernest s retort, "and be sent to Maine, or Florida, or 
the Philippines, or anywhere else, to drown in blood 
your own comrades civil-warring for their liberties. 
While from Kansas, or Wisconsin, or any other state, 
your own comrades would go into the militia and 
come here to California to drown in blood your own 
civil-warring." 

Now they were really shocked, and they sat wordless, 
until Mr. Owen murmured: 

"We would not go into the militia. That would 
settle it. We would not be so foolish." 

Ernest laughed outright. 

"You do not understand the combination that has 
been effected. You could not help yourself. You 
would be drafted into the militia." 

"There is such a thing as civil law," Mr. Owen 
insisted. 

"Not when the government suspends civil law. In 
that day when you speak of rising in your strength, 
your strength would be turned against yourself. Into 
the militia you would go, willy-nilly. Habeas corpus, I 
heard some one mutter just now. Instead of habeas 
corpus you would get post mortems. If you refused 
to go into the militia, or to obey after you were in, you 
would be tried by drumhead court martial and shot 
down like dogs. It is the law." 

"It is not the law!" Mr. Calvin asserted positively. 



138 THE IRON HEEL 

"There is no such law. Young man, you have dreamed 
all this. Why, you spoke of sending the militia to the 
Philippines. That is unconstitutional. The Consti 
tution especially states that the militia cannot be sent 
out of the country." 

" What s the Constitution got to do with it?" Ernest 
demanded. "The courts interpret the Constitution, and 
the courts, as Mr. Asmunsen agreed, are the creatures of 
the trusts. Besides, it is as I have said, the law. It has 
been the law for years, for nine years, gentlemen." 

"That we can be drafted into the militia?" Mr. Cal 
vin asked incredulously. "That they can shoot us by 
drumhead court martial if we refuse?" 

"Yes," Ernest answered, "precisely that." 

"How is it that we have never heard of this law?" 
my father asked, and I could see that it was likewise 
new to him. 

"For two reasons," Ernest said. "First, there has 
been no need to enforce it. If there had, you d have 
heard of it soon enough. And secondly, the law was 
rushed through Congress and the Senate secretly, 
with practically no discussion. Of course, the news 
papers made no mention of it. But we socialists knew 
about it. We published it in cur papers. But you 
never read our papers." 

"I still insist you are dreaming," Mr. Calvin said stub 
bornly. "The country would never have permitted it." 

"But the country did permit it," Ernest replied. 



THE MACHINE BREAKERS 139 

"And as for my dreaming - he put his hand in his 
pocket and drew out a small pamphlet "tell me if 
this looks like dream-stuff." 

He opened it and began to read: 

" Section One, be it enacted, and so forth and so 
forth, that the militia shall consist of every able-bodied 
male citizen of the respective states, territories, and 
District of Columbia, who is more than eighteen and 
less tnan forty-five years of age. 

" Section Seven, that any officer or enlisted man 
remember Section One, gentlemen, you are all enlisted 
men that any enlisted man of the militia who shall 
refuse or neglect to present himself to such mustering 
officer upon being called forth as herein prescribed, shall 
be subject to trial by court martial, and shall be pun 
ished as such court martial shall direct. 

" Section Eight, that courts martial, for the trial 
of officers or men of the militia, shall be composed of 
militia officers only. 

" Section Nine, that the militia, when called into the 
actual service of the United States, shall be subject 
to the same rules and articles of war as the regular 
troops of the United States/ 

"There you are, gentlemen, American citizens, 
and fellow-militiamen. Nine years ago we socialists 
thought that law was aimed against labor. But it 
would seem that it was aimed against you, too. Con 
gressman Wiley, in the brief discussion that was per- 



140 THE IRON HEEL 

mitted, said that the bill provided for a reserve force 
to take the mob by the throat - -you re the mob, 
gentlemen and protect at all hazards life, liberty, 
and property. And in the time to come, when you 
rise in your strength, remember that you will be rising 
against the property of the trusts, and the liberty of the 
trusts, according to the law, to squeeze you. Your 
teeth are pulled, gentlemen. Your claws are trimmed. 
In the day you rise in your strength, toothless and 
clawless, you will be as harmless as an army of clams." 

"I don t believe it!" Kowalt cried. "There is no 
such law. It is a canard got up by you socialists." 

"This bill was introduced in the House of Repre 
sentatives on July 30, 1902," was the reply. "It was 
introduced by Representative Dick of Ohio. It was 
rushed through. It was passed unanimously by the 
Senate on January 14, 1903. And just seven days 
afterward was approved by the President of the 
United States." 1 

1 Everhard was right in the essential particulars, though his date 
of the introduction of the bill is in error. The bill was introduced on 
June 30, and not on July 30. The Congressional Record is here in 
Ardis, and a reference to it shows mention of the bill on the following 
dates: June 30, December 9, 15, 16, and 17, 1902, and January 7 and 
14, 1903. The ignorance evidenced by the business men at the dinner 
was nothing unusual. Very few people knew of the existence of this 
law. E. Untermann, a revolutionist, in July, 1903, published a pam 
phlet at Girard, Kansas, on the "Militia Bill." This pamphlet had a 
small circulation among workingmen ; but already had the segregation 
of classes proceeded so far, that the members of the middle class never 
heard of the pamphlet at all, and so remained in ignorance of the 
law. 



CHAPTER IX 

THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 

IN the midst of the consternation his revelation had 
produced, Ernest began again to speak. 

" Y0u have said, a dozen of you to-night, that social 
ism is impossible. You have asserted the impossible, 
now let me demonstrate the inevitable. Not only is it 
inevitable that you small capitalists shall pass away, 
but it is inevitable that the large capitalists, and the 
trusts also, shall pass away. Remember, the tide of 
evolution never flows backward. It flows on and on, 
and it flows from competition to combination, and from 
little combination to large combination, and from large 
combination to colossal combination, and it flows on to 
socialism, which is the most colossal combination of all. 

"You tell me that I dream. Very good. I ll give 
you the mathematics of my dream; and here, in ad 
vance, I challenge you to show that my mathematics are 
wrong. I shall develop the inevitability of the break 
down of the capitalist system, and I shall demonstrate 
mathematically why it must break down. Here goes, 
and bear with me if at first I seem irrelevant. 

Let us, first of all, investigate a particular industrial 
process, and whenever I state something with which 

141 



142 THE IRON HEEL 

you disagree, please interrupt me. Here is a shoa 
factory. This factory takes leather and makes it into 
shoes. Here is one hundred dollars worth of leather. 
It goes through the factory and comes out in the form 
of shoes, worth, let us say, two hundred dollars. What 
has happened? One hundred dollars has been added 
to the value of the leather. How was it added ? Let 
us see. 

" Capital and labor added this value of one hundred 
dollars. Capital furnished the factory, the machines, 
and paid all the expenses. Labor furnished labor. 
By the joint effort of capital and labor one hundred 
dollars of value was added. Are you all agreed so far ? " 

Heads nodded around the table in affirmation. 

" Labor and capital having produced this one hundred 
dollars, now proceed to divide it. The statistics of this 
division are fractional; so let us, for the sake of con 
venience, make them roughly approximate. Capital 
takes fifty dollars as its share, and labor gets in wages 
fifty dollars as its share. We will not enter into the 
squabbling over the division. 1 No matter how much 
squabbling takes place, in one percentage or another the 

1 Everhard here clearly develops the cause of all the labor troubles 
of that time. In the division of the joint-product, capital wanted all 
it could get, and labor wanted all it could get. This quarrel over 
the division was irreconcilable. So long as the system of capitalistic 
production existed, labor and capital continued to quarrel over the 
division of the joint-product. It is a ludicrous spectacle to us, but 
we must not forget that we have seven centuries advantage over those 
that lived in that time. 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 143 

division is arranged. And take notice here, that what 
is true of this particular industrial process is true of all 
industrial processes. Am I right?" 

Again the whole table agreed with Ernest. 
, "Now, suppose labor, having received its fifty dollars, 
wanted to buy back shoes. It could only buy back 
fifty dollars worth. That s clear, isn t it? 

"And now we shift from this particular process to the 
sum total of all industrial processes in the United States, 
which includes the leather itself, raw material, trans 
portation, selling, everything. We will say, for the 
sake of round figures, that the total production of 
wealth in the United States in one year is four billion 
dollars. Then labor has received in wages, during the 
same period, two billion dollars. Four billion dollars 
has been produced. How much of this can labor buy 
back? Two billions. There is no discussion of this, 
I am sure. For that matter, my percentages are mild. 
Because of a thousand capitalistic devices, labor cannot 
buy back even half of the total product. 

"But to return. We will say labor buys back two 
billions. Then it stands to reason that labor can con 
sume only two billions. There are still two billions to 
be accounted for, which labor cannot buy back and 
consume." 

"Labor does not consume its two billions, even," Mr. 
Kowalt spoke up. "If it did, it would not have any 
deposits in the savings banks." 



144 THE IRON HEEL 

"Labor s deposits in the savings banks are only a sort 
of reserve fund that is consumed as fast as it accumu 
lates. These deposits are saved for old age, for sickness 
and accident, and for funeral expenses. The savings 
bank deposit is simply a piece of the loaf put back on 
the shelf to be eaten next day. No, labor consumes all 
of the total product that its wages will buy back. 

"Two billions are left to capital. After it has paid 
its expenses, does it consume the remainder? Does 
capital consume all of its two billions?" 

Ernest stopped and put the question point blank to a 
number of the men. They shook their heads. 

"I don t know," one of them frankly said. 

"Of course you do," Ernest went on. "Stop and 
think a moment. If capital consumed its share, the 
sum total of capital could not increase. It would re 
main constant. If you will look at the economic his 
tory of the United States, you will see that the sum total 
of capital has continually increased. Therefore cap 
ital does not consume its share. Do you remember 
when England owned so much of our railroad bonds? 
As the years went by, we bought back those bonds. 
What does that mean? That part of capital s uncon- 
sumed share bought back the bonds. What is the 
meaning of the fact that to-day the capitalists of the 
United States own hundreds and hundreds of millions 
of dollars of Mexican bonds, Russian bonds, Italian 
bonds ; Grecian bonds? The meaning is that those 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 145 

hundreds and hundreds of millions were part of capital s 
share which capital did not consume. Furthermore, 
from the very beginning of the capitalist system, capi 
tal has never consumed all of its share. 

"And now we come to the point. Four billion dol 
lars of wealth is produced in one year in the United 
States. Labor buys back and consumes two billions. 
Capital does not consume the remaining two billions. 
There is a large balance left over unconsumed. What 
is done with this balance? What can be done with it? 
Labor cannot consume any of it, for labor has already 
spent all its wages. Capital will not consume this 
balance, because, already, according to its nature, it 
has consumed all it can. And still remains the balance. 
What can be done with it? What is done with it?" 

"It is sold abroad," Mr. Kowalt volunteered. 

"The very thing," Ernest agreed. "Because of this 
balance arises our need for a foreign market. This is 
sold abroad. It has to be sold abroad. There is no 
other way of getting rid of it. And that uncon- 
sumed surplus, sold abroad, becomes what we call 
our favorable balance of trade. Are we all agreed 
so far?" 

"Surely it is a waste of time to elaborate these 
ABC s of commerce," Mr. Calvin said tartly. "We 
all understand them." 

"And it is by these ABC s I have so carefully 
elaborated that I shall confound you," Ernest retorted. 



146 THE IRON HEEL 

" There s the beauty of it. And I m going to confound 
you with them right now. Here goes. 

"The United States is a capitalist country that has 
developed its resources. According to its capitalist 
system of industry, it has an unconsumed surplus that 
must be got rid of, and that must be got rid of abroad. 1 
What is true of the United States is true of every other 
capitalist country with developed resources. Every 
one of such countries has an unconsumed surplus. 
Don t forget that they have already traded with one 
another, and that these surpluses yet remain. Labor 
in all these countries has spent its wages, and cannot 
buy any of the surpluses. Capital in all these countries 
has already consumed all it is able according to its 
nature. And still remain the surpluses. They cannot 
dispose of these surpluses to one another. How are they 
going to get rid of them?" 

"Sell them to countries with undeveloped resources," 
Mr. Kowalt suggested. 

"The very thing. You see, my argument is so clear 

1 Theodore Roosevelt, President of the United States a few years 
prior to this time, made the following public declaration: "A more 
liberal and extensive reciprocity in the purchase and sale of commodities 
is necessary, so that the overproduction of the United States can be satis 
factorily disposed of to foreign countries." Of course, this overproduc 
tion he mentions was the profits of the capitalist system over and 
beyond the consuming power of the capitalists. It was at this time 
that Senator Mark Hanna said : " The production of wealth in the 
United States is one-third larger annually than its consumption." Also 
a fellow-Senator, Chauncey Depew, said: " The American people 
produce annually two billions more wealth than they consume." 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 147 

and simple that in your own minds you carry it on for 
me. And now for the next step. Suppose the United 
States disposes of its surplus to a country with unde 
veloped resources like, say, Brazil. Remember this 
surplus is over and above trade, which articles of trade 
have been consumed. What, then, does the United 
States get in return from Brazil?" 

"Gold," said Mr. Kowalt. 

VBut there is only so much gold, and not much of it, 
in the world," Ernest objected. 

"Gold in the form of securities and bonds and so 
forth," Mr. Kowalt amended. 

"Now you ve struck it," Ernest said. "From Brazil 
the United States, in return for her surplus, gets bonds 
and securities. And what does that mean ? It means 
that the United States is coming to own railroads in 
Brazil, factories, mines, and lands in Brazil. And 
what is the meaning of that in turn?" 

Mr. Kowalt pondered and shook his head. 

"I ll tell you," Ernest continued. "It means that 
the resources of Brazil are being developed. And now, 
the next point. When Brazil, under the capitalist 
system, has developed her resources, she will herself 
have an unconsumed surplus. Can she get rid of this 
surplus to the United States? No, because the United 
States has herself a surplus. Can the United States do 
what she previously did get rid of her surplus to 
Brazil? No, for Brazil now has a surplus, too. 



148 THE IRON HEEL 

"What happens? The United States and Brazil 
must both seek out other countries with undeveloped 
resources, in order to unload the surpluses on them. 
But by the very process of unloading the surpluses, 
the resources of those countries are in turn developed. 
Soon they have surpluses, and are seeking other coun 
tries on which to unload. Now, gentlemen, follow me. 
The planet is only so large. There are only so many 
countries in the world. What will happen when every 
country in the world, down to the smallest and last, 
with a surplus in its hands, stands confronting every 
other country with surpluses in their hands?" 

He paused and regarded his listeners. The bepuzzle- 
ment in their faces was delicious. Also, there was awe 
in their faces. Out of abstractions Ernest had conjured 
a vision and made them see it. They were seeing 
it then, as they sat there, and they were frightened 
by it. 

"We started with ABC, Mr. Calvin," Ernest said 
slyly. "I have now given you the rest of the alphabet. 
It is very simple. That is the beauty of it. You 
surely have the answer forthcoming. What, then, 
when every country in the world has an unconsumed 
surplus? Where will your capitalist system be 
then?" 

But Mr. Calvin shook a troubled head. He was ob 
viously questing back through Ernest s reasoning in 
search of an error. 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 149 

"Let me briefly go over the ground with you again," 
Ernest said. "We began with a particular industrial 
process, the shoe factory. We found that the division 
of the joint product that took place there was similar 
to the division that took place in the sum total of all 
industrial processes. We found that labor could buy 
back with its wages only so much of the product, and 
that capital did not consume all of the remainder of 
th* product. We found that when labor had con 
sumed to the full extent of its wages, and when 
capital had consumed all it wanted, there was 
still left an unconsumed surplus. We agreed that 
this surplus could only be disposed of abroad. We 
agreed, also, that the effect of unloading this sur 
plus on another country would be to develop the 
resources of that country, and that in a short time 
that country would have an unconsumed surplus. 
We extended this process to all the countries on the 
planet, till every country was producing every year, 
and every day, an unconsumed surplus, which it 
could dispose of to no other country. And now I 
ask you again, what are we going to do with those 
surpluses ? " 

Still no one answered. 

"Mr. Calvin?" Ernest queried. 

"It beats me," Mr. Calvin confessed. 

"I never dreamed of such a thing," Mr. Asmunsen 
said. "And yet it does seem clear as print." 



150 THE IRON HEEL 

It was the first time I had ever heard Karl Marx s * 
doctrine of surplus value elaborated, and Ernest had 
done it so simply that I, too, sat puzzled and dum- 
founded. 

"I ll tell you a way to get rid of the surplus," Ernest 
said. "Throw it into the sea. Throw every year hun 
dreds of millions of dollars worth of shoes and wheat 
and clothing and all the commodities of commerce into 
the sea. Won t that fix it?" 

"It will certainly fix it," Mr. Calvin answered. "But 
it is absurd for you to talk that way." 

Ernest was upon him like a flash. 

"Is it a bit more absurd than what you advocate, 
you machine-breaker, returning to the antediluvian 
ways of your forefathers? What do you propose in 
order to get rid of the surplus ? You would escape the 
problem of the surplus by not producing any surplus. 
And how do you propose to avoid producing a surplus ? 
By returning to a primitive method of production, so 
confused and disorderly and irrational, so wasteful and 
costly, that it will be impossible to produce a surplus." 

Mr. Calvin swallowed. The point had been driven 
home. He swallowed again and cleared his throat. 

1 Karl Marx the great intellectual hero of Socialism. A German 
Jew of the nineteenth century. A contemporary cf John Stuart Mill. 
It seems incredible to us that whole generations should have elapsed 
after the enunciation of Marx s economic discoveries, in which time 
he was sneered at by the world s accepted thinkers and scholars. 
Because of his discoveries he was banished from his native country, 
and he died an exile in England. 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 151 

"You are right," he said. "I stand convicted. It 
is absurd. But we ve got to do something. It is a 
case of life and death for us of the middle class. We 
refuse to perish. We elect to be absurd and to return 
to the truly crude and wasteful methods of our fore 
fathers. We will put back industry to its pre-trust 
stage. We will break the machines. And what are 
you going to do about it?" 

"But you can t break the machines," Ernest replied. 
"You cannot make the tide of evolution flow backward. 
Opposed to you are two great forces, each of which 
is more powerful than you of the middle class. The 
large capitalists, the trusts, in short, will not let you 
turn back. They don t want the machines destroyed. 
And greater than the trusts, and more powerful, is 
labor. It will not let you destroy the machines. The 
ownership of the world, along with the machines, lies 
between the trusts and labor. That is the battle 
alignment. Neither side wants the destruction of the 
machines. But each side wants to possess the machines. 
In this battle the middle class has no place. The mid 
dle class is a pygmy between two giants. Don t you 
see, you poor perishing middle class, you are caught 
between the upper and nether millstones, and even now 
has the grinding begun. 

"I have demonstrated to you mathematically the in 
evitable breakdown of the capitalist system. When 
every country stands with an unconsumed and unsal- 



152 THE IRON HEEL 

able surplus on its hands, the capitalist system will 
break down under the terrific structure of profits that 
it itself has reared. And in that day there won t be 
any destruction of the machines. The struggle then 
will be for the ownership of the machines. If labor 
jwins, your way will be easy, The United States, and 
the whole world for that matter, will enter upon a 
new and tremendous era. Instead of being crushed 
by the machines, life will be made fairer, and happier, 
and nobler by them. You of the destroyed middle 
class, along with labor there will be nothing but labor 
then ; so you, and all the rest of labor, will participate 
in the equitable destribution of the products of the 
wonderful machines. And we, all of us, will make 
new and more wonderful machines. And there won t 
be any unconsumed surplus, because there won t be 
any profits." 

"But suppose the trusts win in this battle over the 
ownership of the machines and the world?" Mr. 
Kowalt asked. 

"Then," Ernest answered, "you, and labor, and all 
of us, will be crushed under the iron heel of a despotism 
as relentless and terrible as any despotism that has 
blackened the pages of the history of man. That will 
be a good name for that despotism, the Iron Heel." 

There was a long pause, and every man at the table 
meditated in ways unwonted and profound. 
1 The earliest known use of that name to designate the Oligarchy. 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 153 

"But this socialism of yours is a dream," Mr. Calvin 
Baid; and repeated, "a dream." 

"I ll show you something that isn t a dream, then," 
Ernest answered. "And that something I shall call 
the Oligarchy. You call it the Plutocracy. We both 
mean the same thing, the large capitalists or the trusts. 
Let us see where the power lies to-day. And in order 
to do so, let us apportion society into its class divisions. 

"Xhere are three big classes in society. First comes 
the Plutocracy, which is composed of wealthy bankers, 
railway magnates, corporation directors, and trust 
magnates. Second, is the middle class, your class, 
gentlemen, which is composed of farmers, merchants, 
small manufacturers, and professional men. And third 
and last comes my class, the proletariat, which is 
composed of the wage-workers. 1 

"You cannot but grant that the ownership of wealth 
constitutes essential power in the United States to-day. 
How is this wealth owned by these three classes ? Here 
are the figures. The Plutocracy owns sixty-seven 
billions of wealth. Of the total number of persons 
engaged in occupations in the United States, only 
nine-tenths of one per cent are from the Plutocracy, 



1 This division of society made by Everhard is in accordance with 
that made by Lucien Sanial, one of the statistical authorities of that 
time. His calculation of the membership of these divisions by occu 
pations, from the United States Census of 1900, is as follows: Pluto 
cratic class, 250,251; Middle class, 8,429,845; and Proletariat class, 
20,393,137. 



154 THE IRON HEEfc 

yet the Plutocracy owns seventy per cent of the total 
wealth. The middle class owns twenty-four billions. 
Twenty-nine per cent of those in occupations are from 
the middle class, and they own twenty-five per cent of 
the total wealth. Remains the proletariat. It owns 
four billions. Of all persons in occupations, seventy 
per cent come from the proletariat; and the prole 
tariat owns four per cent of the total wealth. Where 
does the power lie, gentlemen?" 

"From your own figures, we of the middle class are 
more powerful than labor," Mr. Asmunsen remarked. 

" Calling us weak does not make you stronger in the 
face of the strength of the Plutocracy," Ernest re 
torted. "And furthermore, I m not done with you. 
There is a greater strength than wealth, and it is greater 
because it cannot be taken away. Our strength, the 
strength of the protelariat, is in our muscles, in our 
hands to cast ballots, in our fingers to pull triggers. 
This strength we cannot be stripped of. It is the primi 
tive strength, it is the strength that is to life germane, 
it is the strength that is stronger than wealth, and 
that wealth cannot take away. 

"But your strength is detachable. It can be taken 
away from you. Even now the Plutocracy is taking 
it away from you. In the end it will take it all away 
from you. And then you will cease to be the middle 
class. You will descend to us. You will become prole 
tarians. And the beauty of it is that you will then add 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 155 

to our strength. We will hail you brothers, and we 
will fight shoulder to shoulder in the cause of humanity. 

"You see, labor has nothing concrete of which to be 
despoiled. Its share of the wealth of the country con 
sists of clothes and household furniture, with here and 
there, in very rare cases, an unencumbered home. But 
you have the concrete wealth, twenty-four billions of 
it, and the Plutocracy will take it away from you. Of 
course*, there is the large likelihood that the proletariat 
will take it away first. Don t you see your position, 
gentlemen? The middle class is a wobbly little lamb 
between a lion and a tiger. If one doesn t get you, the 
other will. And if the Plutocracy gets you first, why 
it s only a matter of time when the Proletariat gets the 
Plutocracy. 

"Even your present wealth is not a true measure 
of your power. The strength of your wealth at this 
moment is only an empty shell. That is why you are 
crying out your feeble little battle-cry, Return to the 
ways of our fathers. You are aware of your impo- 
tency. You know that your strength is an empty 
shell. And I ll show you the emptiness of it. 

"What power have the farmers? Over fifty per 
cent are thralls by virtue of the fact that they are 
merely tenants or are mortgaged. And all of them 
are thralls by virtue of the fact that the trusts already 
own or control (which is the same thing only better) 
own and control all the means of marketing the crops, 



156 THE IRON HEEL 

such as cold storage, railroads, elevators, and steam 
ship lines. And, furthermore, the trusts control the 
markets. In all this the farmers are without power. 
As regards their political and governmental power, 
I ll take that up later, along with the political and 
governmental power of the whole middle class. 

"Day by day the trusts squeeze out the farmers as 
they squeezed out Mr. Calvin and the rest of the dairy 
men. And day by day are the merchants squeezed 
out in the same way. Do you remember how, in six 
months, the Tobacco Trust squeezed out over four 
hundred cigar stores in New York City alone ? Where 
are the old-time owners of the coal fields ? You know 
to-day, without my telling you, that the Railroad 
Trust owns or controls the entire anthracite and bitu 
minous coal fields. Doesn t the Standard Oil Trust 1 
own a score of the ocean lines? And does it not also 
control copper, to say nothing of running a smelter 
trust as a little side enterprise? There are ten thou 
sand cities in the United States to-night lighted by the 
companies owned or controlled by Standard Oil, and 
in as many cities all the electric transportation, 
urban, suburban, and interurban, is in the hands of 
Standard Oil. The small capitalists who were in these 
thousands of enterprises are gone. You know that. 
It s the same way that you are going. 

"The small manufacturer is like the farmer; and 

1 Standard Oil and Rockefeller see footnote on page 159. 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 157 

small manufacturers and farmers to-day are reduced, 
to all intents and purposes, to feudal tenure. For that 
matter, the professional men and the artists are at this 
present moment villeins in everything but name, while 
the politicians are henchmen. Why do you, Mr. Cal 
vin, work all your nights and days to organize the 
farmers, along with the rest of the middle class, into 
a new political party? Because the politicians of the 
old parties will have nothing to do with your atavistic 
ideas; and with your atavistic ideas, they will have 
nothing to do because they are what I said they are, 
henchmen, retainers of the Plutocracy. 

"I spoke of the professional men and the artists as 
villeins. What else are they? One and all, the pro 
fessors, the preachers, and the editors, hold their jobs 
by serving the Plutocracy, and their service consists 
of propagating only such ideas as are either harmless to 
or commendatory of the Plutocracy. Whenever they 
\ propagate ideas that menace the Plutocracy, they lose 
their jobs, in which case, if they have not provided for 
the rainy day, they descend into the proletariat and 
either perish or become working-class agitators. And 
don t forget that it is the press, the pulpit, and the 
university that mould public opinion, set the thought- 
pace of the nation. As for the artists, they merely 
pander to the little less than ignoble tastes of the 
Plutocracy. 

"But after all, wealth in itself is not the real power; 



158 THE IRON HEEL 

it is the means to power, and power is governmental. 
Who controls the government to-day ? The proletariat 
with its twenty millions engaged in occupations ? Even 
you laugh at the idea. Does the middle class ; with its 
eight million occupied members? No more than the 
proletariat. Who, then, controls the government ? The 
Plutocracy, with its paltry quarter of a million of occu 
pied members. But this quarter of a million does not 
control the government, though it renders yeoman ser 
vice. It is the brain of the Plutocracy that controls 
the government, and this brain consists of seven 1 
small and powerful groups of men. And do not for 
get that these groups are working to-day practically 
in unison. 

"Let me point out the power of but one of them, the 
railroad group. It employs forty thousand lawyers to 
defeat the people in the courts. It issues countless 
thousands of free passes to judges, bankers, editors, 
ministers, university men, members of state legisla- 

1 Even as late as 1907, it was considered that eleven groups domi 
nated the country, but this number was reduced by the amalgamation 
of the five railroad groups into a supreme combination of all the rail 
roads. These five groups so amalgamated, along with their financial 
and political allies, were (1) James J. Hill with his control of the North 
west; (2) the Pennsylvania railway group, Schiff financial manager, 
with big banking firms of Philadelphia and New York; (3) Harriman, 
with Frick for counsel and Odell as political lieutenant, controlling the 
central continental, Southwestern and Southern Pacific Coast lines of 
transportation ; (1) the Gould family railway interests ; and (5) Moore, 
Reid, and Leeds, known as the " Rock Island crowd." These strong 
oligarchs arose out of the conflict of competition and travelled tb* 
inevitable road toward combination. 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 159 

tures, and of Congress. It maintains luxurious lob 
bies * at every state capital, and at the national capital ; 
and in all the cities and towns of the land it employs 
an immense army of pettifoggers and small politicians 
whose business is to attend primaries, pack conven 
tions, get on juries, bribe judges, and in every way to 
work for its interests. 2 

"Gentlemen, I have merely sketched the power of one 
of the seven groups that constitute the brain of the 
Plutocracy. 3 Your twenty-four billions of wealth does 

1 Lobby a peculiar institution for bribing, bulldozing, and cor 
rupting the legislators who were supposed to represent the people 3 
interests. 

2 A decade before this speech of Everhard s, the New York Board 
of Trade issued a report from which the following is quoted : " The 
railroads control absolutely the legislatures of a majority of the states of 
the Union ; they make and unmake United States Senators, congressmen, 
and governors, and are practically dictators of the governmental policy 
of the United States." 

3 Rockefeller began as a member of the proletariat, and through 
thrift and cunning succeeded in developing the first perfect trust, 
namely that known as Standard Oil. We cannot forbear giving the 
following remarkable page from the history of the times, to show how 
the need for reinvestment of the Standard Oil surplus crushed out 
small capitalists and hastened the breakdown of the capitalist system. 
David Graham Phillips was a radical writer of the period, and the 
quotation, by him, is taken from a copy of the Saturday Evening Post, 
dated October 4, 1902 A.D. This is the only copy of this publication 
that has come down to us, and yet, from its appearance and content, 
we cannot but conclude that it was one of the popular periodicals 
with a large circulation. The quotation here follows: 

" About ten years ago Rockefeller s income was given as thirty millions 
by an excellent authority. He had reached the limit of profitable invest 
ment of profits in the oil industry. Here, then, were these enormous 
sums in cash pouring in more than $2,000,000 a month for John 
Davison Rockefeller alone. The problem of reinvestment became mori 



160 THE IRON HEEL 

not give you twenty-five cents worth of governmental 
power. It is an empty shell, and soon even the empty 

serious. It became a nightmare. The oil income was swelling, swelling, 
and the number of sound investments limited, even more limited than 
it is now. It was through no special eagerness for more gains that the 
Rockefellers began to branch out from oil into other things. They were 
forced, swept on by this inrolling tide of wealth which their monopoly 
magnet irresistibly attracted. They developed a staff of investment 
seekers and investigators. It is said that the chief of this staff has a 
salary of $125,000 a year. 

" The first conspicuous excursion and incursion of the Rockefellers 
was into the railway field. By 1895 they controlled one-fifth of the 
railway mileage of the country. What do they own or, through dominant 
ownership, control to-day ? They are powerful in all the great railways 
of New York, north, east, and west, except one, where their share is only 
a few millions. They are in most of the great railways radiating from 
Chicago. They dominate in several of the systems that extend to the 
Pacific. It is their votes that make Mr. Morgan so potent, though, 
it may be added, they need his brains more than he needs their votes 
at present, and the combination of the two constitutes in large measure 
the community of interest. 

"But railways could not alone absorb rapidly enough those mighty 
floods of gold. Presently John D. Rockefeller s $2,500,000 a month 
had increased to four, to five, to six millions a month, to $75,000,000 a 
year. Illuminating oil was becoming all profit. The reinvestments of 
income were adding their mite of many annual millions. 

" The Rockefellers went into gas and electricity when those industries 
had developed to the safe investment stage. And now a large part of 
the American people must begin to enrich the Rockefellers as soon as the 
sun goes down, no matter what form of illuminant they use. They went 
into farm mortgages. It is said that when prosperity a few years ago 
enabled the farmers to rid themselves of their mortgages, John D. Rocke 
feller was moved almost to tears; eight millions which he had thought 
taken care of for years to come at a good interest were suddenly dumped 
upon his doorstep and there set up a-squawking for a new home. This 
unexpected addition to his worriments in finding places for the progeny 
of his petroleum and their progeny and their progeny s progeny was too 
much for the equanimity of a man without a digestion. . . . 

" The Rockefellers went into mines iron and coal and copper and 
lead; into other industrial companies; into street railways, into national, 



THE MATHEMATICS OF A DREAM 161 

shell will be taken away from you. The Plutocracy 
has all power in its hands to-day. It to-day makes 
the laws, for it owns the Senate, Congress, the courts, 
and the state legislatures. And not only that. Behind 
law must be force to execute the law. To-day the &lt; 
Plutocracy makes the law, and to enforce the law it 
has at its beck and call the police, the army, the navy, 
and, lastly, the militia, which is you, and me, and all of 

Little discussion took place after this, and the dinner 
soon broke up. All were quiet and subdued, and leave- 
taking was done with low voices. It seemed almost 
that they were scared by the vision of the times they 
had seen. 

"The situation is, indeed, serious," Mr. Calvin said 

state, and municipal bonds; into steamships and steamboats and teleg 
raphy; into real estate, into sky scrapers and residences and hotels 
and business blocks; into life insurance, into banking. There was soon 
literally no field of industry where their millions were not at work. . . . 

"The Rockefeller bank the National City Bank is by itself far 
and away the biggest bank in the United States. It is exceeded in the 
world only by the Bank of England and the Bank of France. The de 
posits average more than one hundred millions a day; and it dominates 
the call loan market on Wall Street and the stock market. But it is not 
alone ; it is the head of the Rockefeller chain of banks, which includes 
fourteen banks and trust companies in New York City, and banks of 
great strength and influence in every large money centre in the country. 

" John D. Rockefeller owns Standard Oil stock worth between four and 
five hundred millions at the market quotations. He has a hundred mil 
lions in the steel trust, almost as much in a single western railway system, 
half as much in a second, and so on and on and on until the mind wearies 
of the cataloguing. His income last year was about $100,000,000 it 
is doubtful if the incomes of all the Rothschilds together make a greater 
sum. And it is going up by leaps and bounds." 

H 



162 THE IRON HEEL 

to Ernest. "I have little quarrel with the way you 
have depicted it. Only I disagree with you about 
the doom of the middle class. We shall survive, and 
we shall overthrow the trusts." 

"And return to the ways of your fathers," Ernest 
finished for him. 

"Even so/ Mr. Calvin answered gravely. "I know 
it s a sort of machine-breaking, and that it is absurd. 
But then life seems absurd to-day, what of the machi 
nations of the Plutocracy. And at any rate, our sort 
of machine-breaking is at least practical and possible, 
which your dream is not. Your socialistic dream is 
. . . well, a dream. We cannot follow you." 

"I only wish you fellows knew a little something 
about evolution and sociology," Ernest said wistfully, 
as they shook hands. "We would be saved so much 
trouble if you did." 



CHAPTER X 

THE VORTEX 

FOLLOWING like thunder claps upon the Business 
Men ,s dinner, occurred event after event of terrifying 
moment ; and I, little I, who had lived so placidly all 
my days in the quiet university town, found myself 
and my personal affairs drawn into the vortex of the- 
great world-affairs. Whether it was my love for 
Ernest, or the clear sight he had given me of the 
society in which I lived, that made me a revolutionist, 
I know not; but a revolutionist I became, and I was 
plunged into a whirl of happenings that would have 
been inconceivable three short months before. 

The crisis in my own fortunes came simultaneously 
with great crises in society. First of all, father was 
discharged from the university. Oh, he was not 
technically discharged. His resignation was de 
manded, that was all. This, in itself, did not amount 
to much. Father, in fact, was delighted. He was 
especially delighted because his discharge had been 
precipitated by the publication of his book, " Econom 
ics and Education." It clinched his argument, he 
contended. What better evidence could be advanced 

163 



164 THE IRON HEEL 

to prove that education was dominated by the capitalist 
class ? 

But this proof never got anywhere. Nobody knew 

he had been forced to resign from the university. He 

was so eminent a scientist that such an announcement, 

, coupled with the reason for his enforced resignation, 

would have created somewhat of a furor all over the 

world. The newspapers showered him with praise 

and honor, and commended him for having given up 

the drudgery of the lecture room in order to devote his 

whole time to scientific research. 

At first father laughed. Then he became angry 
tonic angry. Then came the suppression of his book. 
This suppression was performed secretly, so secretly 
that at first we could not comprehend. The publica 
tion of the book had immediately caused a bit of ex 
citement in the country. Father had been politely 
abused in the capitalist press, the tone of the abuse 
being to the effect that it was a pity so great a scientist 
should leave his field and invade the realm of sociology, 
about which he knew nothing and wherein he had 
promptly become lost. This lasted for a week, while 
father chuckled and said the book had touched a sore 
spot on capitalism. And then, abruptly, the news 
papers and the critical magazines ceased saying any 
thing about the book at all. Also, and with equal 
suddenness, the book disappeared from the market. 
.Not a copy was obtainable from any bookseller. 



THE VORTEX 165 

Father wrote to the publishers and was informed that 
the plates had been accidentally injured. An unsatis 
factory correspondence followed. Driven finally to an 
unequivocal stand, the publishers stated that they 
could not see their way to putting the book into type 
again, but that they were quite willing to relinquish 
their rights in it. 

"And you won t find another publishing house in the 
country to touch it," Ernest said. "And if I were 
you, I d hunt cover right now. You ve merely got a 
foretaste of the Iron Heel." 

But father was nothing if not a scientist. He never- 
believed in jumping to conclusions. A laboratory 
experiment was no experiment if it were not carried 
through in all its details. So he patiently went the 
round of the publishing houses. They gave a multitude 
of excuses, but not one house would consider the book. 

When father became convinced that the book had 
actually been suppressed, he tried to get the fact into 
the newspapers; but his communications were ignored. 
At a political meeting of the socialists, where many 
reporters were present, father saw his chance. He 
arose and related the history of the suppression of the 
book. He laughed next day when he read the news 
papers, and then he grew angry to a degree that elimi 
nated all tonic qualities. The papers made no mention 
of the book, but they misreported him beautifully. 
They twisted his words and phrases away from the 



166 THE IRON HEEL 

context, and turned his subdued and controlled re 
marks into a howling anarchistic speech. It was done 
artfully. One instance, in particular, I remember. He 
had used the phrase " social revolution." The reporter 
merely dropped out "social." This was sent out all 
over the country in an Associated Press despatch, and 
from all over the country arose a cry of alarm. Father 
was branded as a nihilist and an anarchist, and in one 
cartoon that was copied widely he was portrayed wav 
ing a red flag at the head of a mob of long-haired, wild- 
eyed men who bore in their hands torches, knives, 
and dynamite bombs. 

He was assailed terribly in the press, in long and 
abusive editorials, for his anarchy, and hints were 
made of mental breakdown on his part. This be 
havior, on the part of the capitalist press, was nothing 
new, Ernest told us. It was the custom, he said, to 
send reporters to all the socialist meetings for the ex 
press purpose of misreporting and distorting what was 
said, in order to frighten the middle class away from 
any possible affiliation with the proletariat. And re 
peatedly Ernest warned father to cease fighting and 
to take to cover. 

The socialist press of the country took up the fight, 
however, and throughout the reading portion of the 
"working class it was known that the book had been 
suppressed. But this knowledge stopped with the 
working class. Next, the "Appeal to Reason," a big 



THE VORTEX 167 

socialist publishing house, arranged with father to 
bring out the book. Father was jubilant, but Ernest 
was alarmed. 

"I tell you we are on the verge of the unknown," 
he insisted. "Big things are happening secretly all 
around us. We can feel them. We do not know what 
they are, but they are there. The whole fabric of 
society is a-tremble with them. Don t ask me. I 
don t, know myself. But out of this flux of society 
something is about to crystallize. It is crystallizing 
now. The suppression of the book is a precipitation. 
How many books have been suppressed ? We haven t 
the least idea. We are in the dark. We have no way 
of learning. Watch out next for the suppression of the 
socialist press and socialist publishing houses. I m. 
afraid it s coming. We are going to be throttled." 

Ernest had his hand on the pulse of events even 
more closely than the rest of the socialists, and within 
two days the first blow was struck. The Appeal to 
Reason was a weekly, and its regular circulation 
amongst the proletariat was seven hundred and fifty 
thousand. Also, it very frequently got out special 
editions of from two to five millions. These great 
editions were paid for and distributed by the small 
army of voluntary workers who had marshalled around 
the Appeal. The first blow was aimed at these 
special editions, and it was a crushing one. By an 
arbitrary ruling of the Post Office, these editions were 



168 THE IRON HEEL 

decided to be not the regular circulation of the paper, 
and for that reason were denied admission to the mails. 

A week later the Post Office Department ruled that 
the paper was seditious, and barred it entirely from 
the mails. This was a fearful blow to the socialist 
propaganda. The Appeal was desperate. It de 
vised a plan of reaching its subscribers through the 
express companies, but they declined to handle it. 
This was the end of the Appeal. But not quite. 
It prepared to go on with its book publishing. Twenty 
thousand copies of father s book were in the bindery, 
and the presses were turning off more. And then, 
without warning, a mob arose one night, and, under a 
waving American flag, singing patriotic songs, set fire 
to the great plant of the Appeal and totally destroyed it. 

Now Girard, Kansas, was a quiet, peaceable town. 
There had never been any labor troubles there. The 
Appeal paid union wages; and, in fact, was the 
backbone of the town, giving employment to hundreds 
of men and women. It was not the citizens of Girard 
that composed the mob. This mob had risen up out 
of the earth apparently, and to all intents and purposes, 
its work done, it had gone back into the earth. Ernest 
saw in the affair the most sinister import. 

"The Black Hundreds * are being organized in the 
United States," he said. "This is the beginning. 

1 The Black Hundreds were reactionary mobs organized by the 
perishing Autocracy in the Russian Revolution. These reactionary 



THE VORTEX 169 

There will be more of it. The Iron Heel is getting 
bold." 

And so perished father s book. We were to see 
much of the Black Hundreds as the days went by. 
Week by week more of the socialist papers were barred 
from the mails, and in a number of instances the Black 
Hundreds destroyed the socialist presses. Of course, 
the newspapers of the land lived up to the reactionary 
policy of the ruling class, and the destroyed socialist 
press was misrepresented and vilified, while the Black 
Hundreds were represented as true patriots and saviours 
of society. So convincing was all this misrepresenta 
tion that even sincere ministers in the pulpit praised 
the Black Hundreds while regretting the necessity of 
violence. 

History was making fast. The fall elections were 
soon to occur, and Ernest was nominated by the 
socialist party to run for Congress. His chance for 
election was most favorable. The street-car strike in 
San Francisco had been broken. And following upon 
it the teamsters strike had been broken. These two 
defeats had been very disastrous to organized labor. 
The whole Water Front Federation, along with its 
allies in the structural trades, had backed up the 
teamsters, and all had smashed down ingloriously. It 

groups attacked the revolutionary groups, and also, at needed mo 
ments, rioted and destroyed property so as to afford the Autocracy 
the pretext of calling out the Cossacks. 



170 THE IRON HEEL 

had been a bloody strike. The police had broken 
countless heads with their riot clubs; and the death 
list had been augmented by the turning loose of a 
machine-gun on the strikers from the barns of the 
Marsden Special Delivery Company. 

In consequence, the men were sullen and vindictive. "* 
They wanted blood, and revenge. Beaten on their 
chosen field, they were ripe to seek revenge by means 
of political action. They still maintained their labor 
organization, and this gave them strength in the politi 
cal struggle that was on. Ernest s chance for election 
grew stronger and stronger. Day by day unions and 
more unions voted their support to the socialists, until 
even Ernest laughed when the Undertakers Assistants 
and the Chicken Pickers fell into line. Labor became 
mulish. While it packed the socialist meetings with 
mad enthusiasm, it was impervious to the wiles of the 
old-party politicians. The old-party orators were usu 
ally greeted with empty halls, though occasionally 
they encountered full halls where they were so roughly * 
handled that more than once it was necessary to call 
out the police reserves. 

History was making fast. The air was vibrant with 
things happening and impending. The country was 
on the verge of hard times, 1 caused by a series of pros- 

1 Under the capitalist regime these periods of hard times were as 
inevitable as they were absurd. Prosperity always brought calamity. 
This, of course, was due to the excess of unconsumed profits that was 
piled up. 



THE VORTEX 171 

perous years wherein the difficulty of disposing abroad 
of the unconsumed surplus had become increasingly 
difficult. Industries were working short time; many 
great factories were standing idle against the time 
when the surplus should be gone ; and wages were being 
cut right and left. 

Also, the great machinist strike had been broken. 
Two hundred thousand machinists, along with their 
five hundred thousand allies in the metal-working 
trades, had been defeated in as bloody a strike as had 
ever marred the United States. Pitched battles had 
been fought with the small armies of armed strike 
breakers * put in the field by the employers associa 
tions; the Black Hundreds, appearing in scores of 
wide-scattered places, had destroyed property; and, 
in consequence, a hundred thousand regular soldiers of 
the United States had been called out to put a fright 
ful end to the whole affair. A number of the labor 

1 Strike-breakers these were, in purpose and practice and every 
thing except name, the private soldiers of the capitalists. They were 
thoroughly organized and well armed, and they were held in readiness 
to be hurled in special trains to any part of the country where labor 
went out on strike or was locked out by the employers. Only those 
curious times could have given rise to the amazing spectacle of one, 
Farley, a notorious commander of strike-breakers, who, in 1906, 
swept across the United States in special trains from New York to 
San Francisco with an army of twenty-five hundred men, fully armed 
and equipped, to break a strike of the San Francisco street-car men. 
Such an act was in direct violation of the laws of the land. The 
fact that this act, and thousands of similar acts, went unpunished, 
goes to show how completely the judiciary was the creature of the 
Plutocracy. 



172 THE IRON HEEL 

leaders had been executed; many others had been 
sentenced to prison, while thousands of the rank and 
file of the strikers had been herded into bull-pens * 
and abominably treated by the soldiers. 

The years of prosperity were now to be paid for. 
All markets were glutted; all markets were falling; * 
and amidst the general crumble of prices the price of 
labor crumbled fastest of all. The land was convulsed 
with industrial dissensions. Labor was striking here, 
there, and everywhere; and where it was not striking, 
it was being turned out by the capitalists. The papers 
were filled with tales of violence and blood. And 
through it all the Black Hundreds played their part. 
Riot, arson, and wanton destruction of property was 
their function, and well they performed it. The 
whole regular army was in the field, called there by 
the actions of the Black Hundreds. 2 All cities and 



1 Bull-pen in a miners strike in Idaho, in the latter part of the 
nineteenth century, it happened that many of the strikers were con 
fined in a bull-pen by the troops. The practice and the name con 
tinued in the twentieth century. 

2 The name only, and not the idea, was imported from Russia. 
The Black Hundreds were a development out of the secret agents of 
the capitalists, and their use arose in the labor struggles of the nine 
teenth century. There is no discussion of this. No less an authority 
of the times than Carroll D. Wright, United States Commissioner of 
Labor, is responsible for the statement. From his book, entitled 
"The Battles of Labor," is quoted the declaration that "in some 
of the great historic strikes the employers themselves have instigated acts 
of violence;" that manufacturers have deliberately provoked strikes 
in order to get rid of surplus stock; and that freight cars have been 
burned by employers agents during railroad strikes in order to increase 



THE VORTEX 173 

towns were like armed camps, and laborers were shot 
down like dogs. Out of the vast army of the unem 
ployed the strike-breakers were recruited; and when 
the strike-breakers were worsted by the labor unions, 
the troops always appeared and crushed the unions. 
Then there was the militia. As yet, it was not neces 
sary to have recourse to the secret militia law. Only 
the regularly organized militia was out, and it was out 
everywhere. And in this time of terror, the regular 
army was increased an additional hundred thousand 
by the government. 

Never had labor received such an all-around beating. 
The great captains of industry, the oligarchs, had for 
the first time thrown their full weight into the breach 
the struggling employers associations had made. 
These associations were practically middle-class affairs, 
and now, compelled by hard times and crashing mar 
kets, and aided by the great captains of industry, they 
gave organized labor an awful and decisive defeat. 
It was an all-powerful alliance, but it was an alliance 
of the lion and the lamb, as the middle class was soon 
to learn. 

Labor was bloody and sullen, but crushed. Yet 
its defeat did not put an end to the hard times. The 
banks, themselves constituting one of the most im- 

disorder. It was out of these secret agents of the employers that the 
Black Hundreds arose; and it was they, in turn, that later became 
that terrible weapon of the Oligarchy, the agents-provocateurs. 



174 THE IRON HEEL 

portant forces of the Oligarchy, continued to call in 
credits. The Wall Street * group turned the stock 
market into a maelstrom where the values of all the 
land crumbled away almost to nothingness. And out 
of all the rack and ruin rose the form of the nascent 
Oligarchy, imperturbable, indifferent, and sure. Its 
serenity and certitude was terrifying. Not only did 
it use its own vast power, but it used all the power of 
the United States Treasury to carry out its plans. 

The captains of industry had turned upon the middle 
class. The employers associations, that had helped 
the captains of industry to tear and rend labor, were 
now torn and rent by their quondam allies. Amidst 
the crashing of the middle men, the small business men 
and manufacturers, the trusts stood firm. Nay, the 
trusts did more than stand firm. They were active. 
They sowed wind, and wind, and ever more wind; 
for they alone knew how to reap the whirlwind and 
make a profit out of it. And such profits ! Colossal 
profits ! Strong enough themselves to weather the 
storm that was largely their own brewing, they turned 
loose and plundered the wrecks that floated about 
them. Values were pitifully and inconceivably 
shrunken, and the trusts added hugely to their hold 
ings, even extending their enterprises into many new 

1 Wall Street so named from a street in ancient New York, where 
was situated the stock exchange, and where the irrational organization 
of society permitted underhanded manipulation of all the industries 
of the country. 



THE VORTEX 175 

fields and always at the expense of the middle 
class. 

Thus the summer of 1912 witnessed the virtual death- 
thrust to the middle class. Even Ernest was astounded 
at the quickness with which it had been done. He 
shook his head ominously and looked forward without 
hope to the fall elections. 

"It s no use," he said. "We are beaten. The Iron 
Heel is here. I had hoped for a peaceable victory at 
the ballot-box. I was wrong. Wickson was right. 
We shall be robbed of our few remaining liberties ; the 
Iron Heel will walk upon our faces; nothing remains 
but a bloody revolution of the working class. Of 
course we will win, but I shudder to think of it." 

And from then on Ernest pinned his faith in revo 
lution. In this he was in advance of his party. His 
fellow-socialists could not agree with him. They still 
insisted that victory could be gained through the elec 
tions. It was not that they were stunned. They were 
too cool-headed and courageous for that. They were 
merely incredulous, that was all. Ernest could not get 
them seriously to fear the coming of the Oligarchy. 
They were stirred by him, but they were too sure of 
their own strength. There was no room in their 
theoretical social evolution for an oligarchy, therefore 
the Oligarchy could not be. 

"We ll send you to Congress and it will be all right," 
they told him at one of our secret meetings. 



176 THE IRON HEEL 

"And when they take me out of Congress," Ernest 
replied coldly, "and put me against a wall, and blow 
my brains out what then?" 

"Then we ll rise in our might," a dozen voices 
answered at once. 

"Then you ll welter in your gore," was his retort. 
"I ve heard that song sung by the middle class, and 
where is it now in its might?" 



CHAPTER XI 

THE GREAT ADVENTURE 

MR. WICKSON did not send for father. They met 
by chance on the ferry-boat to San Francisco, so that 
the warning he gave father was not premeditated. 
Had they not met accidentally, there would not have 
been any warning. Not that the outcome would have 
been different, however. Father came of stout old 
Mayflower * stock, and the blood was imperative in 
him. 

" Ernest was right," he told me, as soon as he had 
returned home. " Ernest is a very remarkable young 
man, and I d rather see you his wife than the wife of 
Rockefeller himself or the King of England." 

"What s the matter?" I asked in alarm. 

"The Oligarchy is about to tread upon our faces 
yours and mine. Wickson as much as told me so 
He was very kind for an oligarch. He offered to 
reinstate me in the university. What do you think 
of that? He, Wickson, a sordid money-grabber, has 

1 One of the first ships that carried colonies to America, after the 
discovery of the New World. Descendants of these original colonists 
were for a while inordinately proud of their genealogy ; but in time the 
blood became so widely diffused that it ran in the veins practically 
of all Americans. 

N 177 



178 THE IRON HEEL 

the power to determine whether I shall or shall not 
teach in the university of the state. But he offered 
me even better than that offered to make me presi 
dent of some great college of physical sciences that is 
being planned the Oligarchy must get rid of its 
surplus somehow, you see. 

" Do you remember what I told that socialist lover 
of your daughter s? he said. I told him that we 
would walk upon the faces of the working class. And 
so we shall. As for you, I have for you a deep respect 
as a scientist ; but if you throw your fortunes in with 
the working class well, watch out for your face, that 
is all. And then he turned and left me." 

"It means we ll have to marry earlier than you 
planned," was Ernest s comment when we told him. 

I could not follow his reasoning, but I was soon to 
learn it. It was at this time that the quarterly divi 
dend of the Sierra Mills was paid or, rather, should 
have been paid, for father did not receive his. After 
waiting several days, father wrote to the secretary. 
Promptly came the reply that there was no record on 
the books of father s owning any stock, and a polite 
request for more explicit information. 

"I ll make it explicit enough, confound him," father 
declared, and departed for the bank to get the stock 
in question from his safe-deposit box. 

"Ernest is a very remarkable man," he said when 
he got back and while I was helping him off with his 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 179 

overcoat. "I repeat, my daughter, that young man 
of yours is a very remarkable young man." 

I had learned, whenever he praised Ernest in such 
fashion, to expect disaster. 

They have already walked upon my face/ father 
explained. "There was no stock. The box was empty. 
You and Ernest will have to get married pretty 
quickly." 

father insisted on laboratory methods. He brought 
the Sierra Mills into court, but he could not bring the 
books of the Sierra Mills into court. He did not con 
trol the courts, and the Sierra Mills did. That explained 
it all. He was thoroughly beaten by the law, and the 
bare-faced robbery held good. 

It is almost laughable now, when I look back on it, 
the way father was beaten. He met Wickson acci 
dentally on the street in San Francisco, and he told 
Wickson that he was a damned scoundrel. And then 
father was arrested for attempted assault, fined in the 
police court, and bound over to keep the peace. It 
was all so ridiculous that when he got home he had to 
laugh himself. But what a furor was raised in the 
local papers ! There was grave talk about the bacillus 
of violence that infected all men who embraced social 
ism; and father, with his long and peaceful life, was 
instanced as a shining example of how the bacillus of 
violence worked. Also, it was asserted by more than 
one paper that father s mind had weakened under the 



180 THE IRON HEEL 

strain of scientific study, and confinement in a state 
asylum for the insane was suggested. Nor was this 
jnerely talk. It was an imminent peril. But father 
vras wise enough to see it. He had the Bishop s ex 
perience to lesson from, and he lessoned well. He kept 
quiet no matter what injustice was perpetrated on 
him, and really, I think, surprised his enemies. 

There was the matter of the house our home. A 
mortgage was foreclosed on it, and we had to give up 
possession. Of course there wasn t any mortgage, and 
never had been any mortgage. The ground had been 
bought outright, and the house had been paid for when 
it was built. And house and lot had always been free 
and unencumbered. Nevertheless there was the mort 
gage, properly and legally drawn up and signed, with 
a record of the payments of interest through a number 
of years. Father made no outcry. As he had been 
robbed of his money, so was he now robbed of his 
home. And he had no recourse. The machinery of 
society was in the hands of those who were bent on 
breaking him. He was a philosopher at heart, and he 
was no longer even angry. 

"I am doomed to be broken," he said to me; "but 
that is no reason that I should not try to be shattered 
as little as possible. These old bones of mine are 
fragile, and I ve learned my lesson. God knows 
I don t want to spend my last days in an insane 
asylum." 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 181 

Which reminds me of Bishop Morehouse, whom 
I have neglected for many pages. But first let me tell 
of my marriage. In the play of events, my marriage 
sinks into insignificance, I know, so I shall barely 
mention it. 

"Now we shall become real proletarians," father said, 
when we were driven from our home. "I have often 
envied that young man of yours for his actual knowl 
edge of the proletariat. Now I shall see and learn for 
myself." 

Father must have had strong in him the blood of 
adventure. He looked upon our catastrophe in the 
light of an adventure. No anger nor bitterness pos 
sessed him. He was too philosophic and simple to 
be vindictive, and he lived too much in the world of 
mind to miss the creature comforts we were giving up. 
So it was, when we moved to San Francisco into four 
wretched rooms in the slum south of Market Street, 
that he embarked upon the adventure with the joy 
and enthusiasm of a child combined with the clear 
sight and mental grasp of an extraordinary intellect. 
He really never crystallized mentally. He had no 
false sense of values. Conventional or habitual values 
meant nothing to him. The only values he recognized 
were mathematical and scientific facts. My father 
was a great man. He had the mind and the soul that 
only great men have. In ways he was even greater 
than Ernest, than whom I have known none greater. 



182 THE IRON HEEL 

Even I found some relief in our change of living. If 
nothing else, I was escaping from the organized ostra 
cism that had been our increasing portion in the uni 
versity town ever since the enmity of the nascent 
Oligarchy had been incurred. And the change was to 
me likewise adventure, and the greatest of all, for it 
was love-adventure. The change in our fortunes had 
hastened my marriage, and it was as a wife that I 
came to live in the four rooms on Pell Street, in the San 
Francisco slum. 

And this out of all remains: I made Ernest happy. 
I came into his stormy life, not as a new perturbing 
force, but as one that made toward peace and repose. 
I gave him rest. It was the guerdon of my love for 
him. It was the one infallible token that I had not 
failed. To bring forgetfulness, or the light of glad 
ness, into those poor tired eyes of his what greater 
joy could have blessed me than that? 

Those dear tired eyes. He toiled as few men ever 
toiled, and all his lifetime he toiled for others. That 
was the measure of his manhood. He was a humanist 
and a lover. And he, with his incarnate spirit of bat 
tle, his gladiator body and his eagle spirit he was as 
gentle and tender to me as a poet. He was a poet. A 
singer in deeds. And all his life he sang the song of 
man. And he did it out of sheer love of man, and for 
man he gave his life and was crucified. 

And all this he did with no hope of future reward. 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 183 

In hk conception of things there was no future life. 
He, who fairly burnt with immortality, denied him 
self immortality such was the paradox of him. He, 
so warm in spirit, was dominated by that cold and for 
bidding philosophy, materialistic monism. I used to 
refute him by telling him that I measured his immor 
tality by the wings of his soul, and that I should have 
to live endless aeons in order to achieve the full meas 
urement. Whereat he would laugh, and his arms 
would leap out to me, and he would call me his sweet 
metaphysician; and the tiredness would pass out of 
his eyes, and into them would flood the happy love- 
light that was in itself a new and sufficient advertise 
ment of his immortality. 

Also, he used to call me his dualist, and he would 
explain how Kant, by means of pure reason, had 
abolished reason, in order to worship God. And he 
drew the parallel and included me guilty of a similar 
act. And when I pleaded guilty, but defended the 
act as highly rational, he but pressed me closer and 
laughed as only one of God s own lovers could laugh. 
I was wont to deny that heredity and environment 
could explain his own originality and genius, any 
more than could the cold groping finger of science 
catch and analyze and classify that elusive essence 
that lurked in the constitution of life itself. 

I held that space was an apparition of God, and that 
soul was a projection of the character of God ; and when 



184 THE IRON HEEL 

he called me his sweet metaphysician, I called him 
my immortal materialist. And so we loved and were 
happy ; and I forgave him his materialism because of 
his tremendous work in the world, performed without 
thought of soul-gain thereby, and because of his so ex 
ceeding modesty of spirit that prevented him from hav 
ing pride and regal consciousness of himself and his soul. 
But he had pride. How could he have been an eagle 
;and not have pride? His contention was that it was 
finer for a finite mortal speck of life to feel Godlike, 
than for a god to feel godlike ; and so it was that he 
exalted what he deemed his mortality. He was fond of 
quoting a fragment from a certain poem. He had never 
seen the whole poem, and he had tried vainly to learn 
its authorship. I here give the fragment, not alone 
because he loved it, but because it epitomized the para 
dox that he was in the spirit of him, and his conception of 
his spirit. For how can a man, with thrilling, and burn 
ing, and exaltation, recite the following and still be 
mere mortal earth, a bit of fugitive force, an evanescent 
form? Here it is: 

" Joy upon joy and gain upon gain 
Are the destined rights of my birth, 
And I shout the praise of my endless days 
To the echoing edge of the earth. 
Though I suffer all deaths that a man can die 
To the uttermost end of time, 
I have deep-drained this, my cup of bliss, 
In every age and clime 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 135 

The froth of Pride, the tang of Power, 

The sweet of Womanhood ! 

I drain the lees upon my knees, 

For oh, the draught is good; 

I drink to Life, I drink to Death, 

And smack my lips with song, 

For when I die, another I shall pass the cup along. 

" The man you drove from Eden s grove 

Was I, my Lord, was I, 
And I shall be there when the earth and the air 

Are rent from sea to sky ; 
For it is my world, my gorgeous world, 

The world of my dearest woes, 
From the first faint cry of the newborn 

To the rack of the woman s throes. 

" Packed with the pulse of an unborn race, 
Torn with a world s desire, 
The surging flood of my wild young blood 
Would quench the judgment fire. 
I am Man, Man, Man, from the tingling flesh 
To the dust of my earthly goal, 
From the nestling gloom of the pregnant womb 
To the sheen of my naked soul. 
Bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh 
The whole world leaps to my will, 
And the unslaked thirst of an Eden cursed 
Shall harrow the earth for its fill. 
Almighty God, when I drain life s glass 
Of all its rainbow gleams, 
The hapless plight of eternal night 
Shall be none too long for my dreams. 

" The man you drove from Eden s grove 
Was I, my Lord, was I, 



186 THE IRON HEEL 

And I shall be there when the earth and the air 

Are rent from sea to sky ; 
For it is my world, my gorgeous world, 

The world of my dear delight, 
From the brightest gleam of the Arctic stream / 

To the dusk of my own love-night." 

Ernest always overworked. His wonderful con 
stitution kept him up; but even that constitution 
could not keep the tired look out of his eyes. His 
dear, tired eyes ! He never slept more than four 
and one-half hours a night; yet he never found 
time to do all the work he wanted to do. He never 
ceased from his activities as a propagandist, and was 
always scheduled long in advance for lectures to work- 
ingmen s organizations. Then there was the campaign. 
He did a man s full work in that alone. With the sup 
pression of the socialist publishing houses, his meagre 
royalties ceased, and he was hard-put to make a living ; 
for he had to make a living in addition to all his other 
labor. He did a great deal of translating for the maga 
zines on scientific and philosophic subjects; and, com- 
ing home late at night, worn out from the strain of 
the campaign, he would plunge into his translating and 
toil on well into the morning hours. And in addition to 
everything, there was his studying. To the day of his 
death he kept up his studies, and he studied prodi 
giously. 



THE GREAT ADVENTURE 187 

And yet he found time in which to love me and make 
me happy. But this was accomplished only through my 
merging my life completely into his. I learned short 
hand and typewriting, and became his secretary. He 
insisted that I succeeded in cutting his work in half ; and 
so it was that I schooled myself to understand his work. 
Our interests became mutual, and we worked together 
and played together. 

And then there were our sweet stolen moments in the 
midst of our work just a word, or caress, or flash of 
love-light; and our moments were sweeter for being 
stolen. For we lived on the heights, where the air was 
keen and sparkling, where the toil was for humanity, 
and where sordidness and selfishness never entered. 
We loved love, and our love was never smirched by 
anything less than the best. And this out of all re 
mains : I did not fail. I gave him rest he who 
worked so hard for others, my dear, tired-eyed mor- 
talist. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE BISHOP 

IT was after my marriage that I chanced upon Bishop 
Morehouse. But I must give the events in their proper 
sequence. After his outbreak at the I. P. H. Con 
vention, the Bishop, being a gentle soul, had yielded 
to the friendly pressure brought to bear upon him, and 
had gone away on a vacation. But he returned more 
fixed than ever in his determination to preach the 
message of the Church. To the consternation of his 
congregation, his first sermon was quite similar to the 
address he had given before the Convention. Again he 
said, and at length and with distressing detail, that the 
Church had wandered away from the Master s teaching, 
and that Mammon had been instated in the place of 
Christ. 

And the result was, willy-nilly, that he was led away 
to a private sanitarium for mental disease, while in the 
newspapers appeared pathetic accounts of his mental 
breakdown and of the saintliness of his character. He 
was held a prisoner in the sanitarium. I called re 
peatedly, but was denied access to him; and I was 

188 



THE BISHOP 189 

terribly impressed by the tragedy of a sane, normal, 
saintly man being crushed by the brutal will of society. 
For the Bishop was sane, and pure, and noble. As 
Ernest said, all that was the matter with him was that 
he had incorrect notions of biology and sociology, and 
because of his incorrect notions he had not gone about 
it in the right way to rectify matters. 

What terrified me was the Bishop s helplessness. If 
he persisted in the truth as he saw it, he was doomed to 
an insane ward. And he could do nothing. His money, 
his position, his culture, could not save him. His views 
were perilous to society, and society could not conceive 
that such perilous views could be the product of a sane 
mind. Or, at least, it seems to me that such was 
society s attitude. 

But the Bishop, in spite of the gentleness and purity 
of his spirit, was possessed of guile. He apprehended 
clearly his danger. He saw himself caught in the web, 
and he tried to escape from it. Denied help from his 
friends, such as father and Ernest and I could have given, 
he was left to battle for himself alone. And in the en 
forced solitude of the sanitarium he recovered. He 
became again sane. His eyes ceased to see visions ; his 
brain was purged of the fancy that it was the duty of 
society to feed the Master s lambs. 

As I say, he became well, quite well, and the news 
papers and the church people hailed his return with 
joy. I went once to his church. The sermon was of 



190 THE IRON HEEL 

the same order as the ones he had preached long before 
his eyes had seen visions. I was disappointed, shocked. 
Had society then beaten him into submission? Wag 
he a coward? Had he been bulldozed into recanting? 
Or had the strain been too great for him, and had he 
meekly surrendered to the Juggernaut of the estab 
lished ? 

I called upon him in his beautiful home. He was 
wofully changed. He was thinner, and there were lines 
on his face which I had never seen before. He was 
manifestly distressed by my coming. He plucked ner 
vously at his sleeve as we talked ; and his eyes were 
restless, fluttering here, there, and everywhere, and 
refusing to meet mine. His mind seemed preoccupied, 
and there were strange pauses in his conversation, 
abrupt changes of topic, and an inconsecutiveness that 
was bewildering. Could this, then, be the firm-poised, 
Christlike man I had known, with pure, limpid eyes 
and a gaze steady and unfaltering as his soul ? He had 
been man-handled ; he had been cowed into subjection. 
His spirit was too gentle. It had not been mighty 
enough to face the organized wolf-pack of society. 

I felt sad, unutterably sad. He talked ambigu 
ously, and was so apprehensive of what I might say 
that I had not the heart to catechise him. He spoke 
in a far-away manner of his illness, and we talked dis- 
jointedly about the church, the alternations in the 
organ, and about petty charities ; and he saw me depart 



THE BISHOP 191 

with such evident relief that I should have laughed had 
not my heart been so full of tears. 

The poor little hero ! If I had only known ! He was 
battling like a giant, and I did not guess it. Alone, 
all alone, in the midst of millions of his fellow-men, he 
was fighting his fight. Torn by his horror of the asylum 
and his fidelity to truth and the right, he clung stead 
fastly to truth and the right ; but so alone was he that 
he did not dare to trust even me. He had learned his 
lesson well too well. 

But I was soon to know. One day the Bishop dis 
appeared. He had told nobody that he was going 
away; and as the days went by and he did not re 
appear, there was much gossip to the effect that he had 
committed suicide while temporarily deranged. But 
this idea was dispelled when it was learned that he had 
sold all his possessions, his city mansion, his country 
house at Menlo Park, his paintings, and collections, and 
even his cherished library. It was patent that he had 
made a clean and secret sweep of everything before he 
disappeared. 

This happened during the time when calamity had 
overtaken us in our own affairs ; and it was not till we 
were well settled in our new home that we had op 
portunity really to wonder and speculate about the 
Bishop s doings. And then, everything was suddenly 
made clear. Early one evening, while it was yet twi 
light, I had run across the street and into the butcher- 



192 THE IRON HEEL 

shop to get some chops for Ernest s supper. We called 
the last meal of the day " supper" in our new environ 
ment. 

Just at the moment I came out of the butcher-shop, 
a man emerged from the corner grocery that stood 
alongside. A queer sense of familiarity made me look 
again. But the man had turned and was walking 
rapidly away. There was something about the slope of 
the shoulders and the fringe of silver hair between coat 
collar and slouch hat that aroused vague memories. 
Instead of crossing the street, I hurried after the man. 
I quickened my pace, trying not to think the thoughts 
that formed unbidden in my brain. No, it was impos 
sible. It could not be not in those faded overalls, 
too long in the legs and frayed at the bottoms. 

I paused, laughed at myself, and almost abandoned 
the chase. But the haunting familiarity of those 
shoulders and that silver hair ! Again I hurried on. 
As I passed him, I shot a keen look at his face ; then I 
whirled around abruptly and confronted the Bishop. 

He halted with equal abruptness, and gasped. A 
large paper bag in his right hand fell to the sidewalk. 
It burst, and about his feet and mine bounced and 
rolled a flood of potatoes. He looked at me with sur 
prise and alarm, then he seemed to wilt away; the 
shoulders drooped with dejection, and he uttered a deep 
sigh. 

I held out my hand. He shook it, but his hand felt 



THE BISHOP 193 

clammy. He cleared his throat in embarrassment, and 
I could see the sweat starting out on his forehead. It 
was evident that he was badly frightened. 

"The potatoes/ he murmured faintly. "They are 
precious." 

Between us we picked them up and replaced them in 
the broken bag, which he now held carefully in the hol 
low of his arm. I tried to tell him my gladness at 
meeting him and that he must come right home with 
me. * 

"Father will be rejoiced to see you," I said. "We 
live only a stone s throw away." 

"I can t," he said, "I must be going. Good-by." 

He looked apprehensively about him, as though 
dreading discovery, and made an attempt to walk on. 

"Tell me where you live, and I shall call later," he 
said, when he saw that I walked beside him and that 
it was my intention to stick to him now that he wag 
found. 

"No," I answered firmly. "You must come now." 

He looked at the potatoes spilling on his arm, and at 
the small parcels on his other arm. 

" Really, it is impossible," he said. "Forgive me for 
my rudeness. If you only knew." 

He looked as if he were going to break down, but the 
next moment he had himself in control. 

"Besides, this food," he went on. "It is a sad case. 
It is terrible. She is an old woman. I must take it to 



194 THE IRON HEEL 

her at once. She is suffering from want of it. I must 
go at once. You understand. Then I will return. I 
promise you." 

"Let me go with you," I volunteered. "Is it far?" 

He sighed again, and surrendered. 

"Only two blocks," he said. "Let us hasten." 

Under the Bishop s guidance I learned something 
of my own neighborhood. I had not dreamed such 
wretchedness and misery existed in it. Of course, 
this was because I did not concern myself with charity. 
I had become convinced that Ernest was right when 
he sneered at charity as a poulticing of an ulcer. 
Remove the ulcer, was his remedy; give to the worker 
his product ; pension as soldiers those who grow honor 
ably old in their toil, and there will be no need for 
charity. Convinced of this, I toiled with him at the 
revolution, and did not exhaust my energy in alle 
viating the social ills that continuously arose from the 
injustice of the system. 

I followed the Bishop into a small room, ten by 
twelve, in a rear tenement. And there we found a 
little old German woman sixty-four years old, the 
Bishop said. She was surprised at seeing me, but 
she nodded a pleasant greeting and went on sewing on 
the pair of men s trousers in her lap. Beside her, on 
the floor, was a pile of trousers. The Bishop dis 
covered there was neither coal nor kindling, and went 
out to buy some. 



THE BISHOP 195 

I took up a pair of trousers and examined her work. 

"Six cents, lady/ she said, nodding her head gently 
while she went on stitching. She stitched slowly, but 
never did she cease from stitching. She seemed mas 
tered by the verb "to stitch." 

"For all that work?" I asked. "Is that what they 
pay? How long does it take you?" 

"Yes," she answered, "that is what they pay. Six 
cente for finishing. Two hours sewing on each pair. 

"But the boss doesn t know that," she added quickly, 
betraying a fear of getting him into trouble. "I m 
slow. I ve got the rheumatism in my hands. Girls 
work much faster. They finish in half that time. The 
boss is kind. Pie lets me take the work home, now 
that I am old and the noise of the machine bothers my 
head. If it wasn t for his kindness, I d starve. 

"Yes, those who work in the shop get eight cents. 
But what can you do? There is not enough work for 
the young. The old have no chance. Often one pair 
is all I can get. Sometimes, like to-day, I am given 
eight pair to finish before night." 

I asked her the hours she worked, and she said it 
depended on the season. 

"In the summer, when there is a rush order, I work 
from five in the morning to nine at night. But in the 
winter it is too cold. The hands do not early get over 
the stiffness. Then you must work later till after 
midnight sometimes. 



196 THE IRON HEEL 

"Yes, it has been a bad summer. The hard times. 
God must be angry. This is the first work the boss 
has given me in a week. It is true, one cannot eat 
much when there is no work. I am used to it. I have 
sewed all my life, in the old country and here in San 
Francisco thirty-three years. 

"If you are sure of the rent, it is all right. The 
houseman is very kind, but he must have his rent. 
It is fair. He only charges three dollars for this room. 
That is cheap. But it is not easy for you to find all of 
three dollars every month." 

She ceased talking, and, nodding her head, went on 
stitching. 

"You have to be very careful as to how you spend 
your earnings," I suggested. 

She nodded emphatically. 

"A^ter the rent it s not so bad. Of course you can t 
buy meat. And there is no milk for the coffee. But 
always there is one meal a day, and often two." 

She said this last proudly. There was a smack of 
success in her words. But as she stitched on in silence, 
I noticed the sadness in her pleasant eyes and the droop 
of her mouth. The look in her eyes became far away. 
She rubbed the dimness hastily out of them ; it inter 
fered with her stitching. 

"No, it is not the hunger that makes the heart 
ache," she explained. "You get used to being hun 
gry. It is for my child that I cry. It was the machine 



THE BISHOP 197 

that killed her. It is true she worked hard, but I 
cannot understand. She was strong. And she was 
young only forty ; and she worked only thirty years. 
She began young, it is true; but my man died. The 
boiler exploded down at the works. And what were 
we to do ? She was ten, but she was very strong. But 
the machine killed her. Yes, it did. It killed her, and 
she was the fastest worker in the shop. I have thought 
about it often, and I know. That is why I cannot work 
in the shop. The machine bothers my head. Always 
I hear it saying, I did it, I did it/ And it says that 
all day long. And then I think of my daughter, and I 
cannot work." 

The moistness was in her old eyes again, and 
she had to wipe it away before she could go on 
stitching. 

I heard the Bishop stumbling up the stairs, and I 
opened the door. What a spectacle he was. On his 
back he carried half a sack of coal, with kindling on 
top. Some of the coal dust had coated his face, and 
the sweat from his exertions was running in streaks. 
He dropped his burden in the corner by the stove and 
wiped his face on a coarse bandana handkerchief. I 
could scarcely accept the verdict of my senses. The 
Bishop, black as a coal-heaver, in a workingman s 
cheap cotton shirt (one button was missing from the 
throat), and in overalls ! That was the most incongru 
ous of all the overalls, frayed at the bottoms, dragged 



198 THE IRON HEEL 

down at the heels, and held up by a narrow leather belt 
around the hips such as laborers wear. 

Though the Bishop was warm, the poor swollen 
hands of the old woman were already cramping with 
the cold ; and before we left her, the Bishop had built 
the fire, while I had peeled the potatoes and put them 
on to boil. I was to learn, as time went by, that there 
were many cases similar to hers, and many worse, 
hidden away in the monstrous depths of the tenements 
in my neighborhood. 

We got back to find Ernest alarmed by my absence. 
After the first surprise of greeting was over, the Bishop 
leaned back in his chair, stretched out his overall- 
covered legs, and actually sighed a comfortable sigh. 
We were the first of his old friends he had met since 
his disappearance, he told us; and during the inter 
vening weeks he must have suffered greatly from 
loneliness. He told us much, though he told us more 
of the joy he had experienced in doing the Master s 
bidding. 

"For truly now," he said, "I am feeding his lambs. 
And I have learned a great lesson. The soul cannot be 
ministered to till the stomach is appeased. His lambs 
must be fed bread and butter and potatoes and meat , 
after that, and only after that, are their spirits ready 
for more refined nourishment." 

He ate heartily of the supper I cooked. Never had 
he had such an appetite at our table in the old days. 



THE BISHOP 199 

We spoke of it, and he said that he had never been so 
healthy in his life. 

"I walk always now," he said, and a blush was on his 
cheek at the thought of the time when he rode in his 
carriage, as though it were a sin not lightly to be laid. 

"My health is better for it/ he added hastily. 
"And I am very happy indeed, most happy. At 
last I am a consecrated spirit." 

And yet there was in his face a permanent pain, the 
pain of the world that he was now taking to himself. 
He was seeing life in the raw, and it was a different life 
from what he had known within the printed books of 
his library. 

"And you are responsible for all this, young man," 
he said directly to Ernest. 

Ernest was embarrassed and awkward. 

"I I warned you," he faltered. 

"No, you misunderstand," the Bishop answered. 
"I speak not in reproach, but in gratitude. I have you 
to thank for showing me my path. You led me from 
theories about life to life itself. You pulled aside the 
veils from the social shams. You were light in my 
darkness, but now I, too, see the light. And I am very 
happy, only ..." he hesitated painfully, and in his 
eyes fear leaped large. "Only the persecution. I harm 
no one. Why will they not let me alone? But it is 
not that. It is the nature of the persecution. I 
shouldn t mind if they cut my flesh with stripes, or 



200 THE IRON HEEL 

burned me at the stake, or crucified me head-down 
ward. But it is the asylum that frightens me. Think 
of it ! Of me in an asylum for the insane ! It is 
revolting. I saw some of the cases at the sanitarium. 
They were violent. My blood chills when I think of it. 
And to be imprisoned for the rest of my life amid 
scenes of screaming madness ! No ! no ! Not that ! 
Not that!" 

It was pitiful. His hands shook, his whole body 
quivered and shrank away from the picture he had 
conjured. But the next moment he was calm. 

" Forgive me," he said simply. "It is my wretched 
nerves. And if the Master s work leads there, so be 
it. Who am I to complain?" 

I felt like crying aloud as I looked at him: "Great 
Bishop ! hero ! God s hero !" 

As the evening wore on we learned more of his 
doings. 

"I sold my house my houses, rather," he said, "and 
all my other possessions. I knew I must do it secretly, 
else they would have taken everything away from me. 
That would have been terrible. I often marvel these 
days at the immense quantity of potatoes two or three 
hundred thousand dollars will buy, or bread, or meat, 
or coal and kindling." He turned to Ernest. "You 
are right, young man. Labor is dreadfully underpaid. 
I never did a bit of work in my life, except to appeal 
sesthetically to Pharisees I thought I was preaching 



THE BISHOP 201 

the message and yet I was worth half a million 
dollars. I never knew what half a million dollars 
meant until I realized how much potatoes and bread 
and butter and meat it could buy. And then I realized 
something more. I realized that all those potatoes and 
that bread and butter and meat were mine, and that I 
had not worked to make them. Then it was clear to 
me, some one else had worked and made them and been 
robbed of them. And when I came down amongst 
the poor I found those who had been robbed and who 
were hungry and wretched because they had been 
robbed." 

We drew him back to his narrative. 

"The money? I have it deposited in many different 
banks under different names. It can never be taken 
away from me, because it can never be found. And it 
is so good, that money. It buys so much food. I never 
knew before what money was good for." 

"I wish we could get some of it for the propaganda," 
Ernest said wistfully. "It would do immense good." 

"Do you think so?" the Bishop said. "I do not 
have much faith in politics. In fact, I am afraid I do 
not understand politics." 

Ernest was delicate in such matters. He did not 
repeat his suggestion, though he knew only too well 
the sore straits the Socialist Party was in through lack 
of money. 

"I sleep in cheap lodging houses," the Bishop went 



202 THE IRON HEEL 

on. "But I am afraid, and I never stay long in one 
place. Also, I rent two rooms in workingmen s houses 
in different quarters of the city. It is a great extrava 
gance, I know, but it is necessary. I make up for it in 
part by doing my own cooking, though sometimes I get 
something to eat in cheap coffee-houses. And I have * 
made a discovery. Tamales 1 are very good when the 
air grows chilly late at night. Only they are so expen 
sive. But I have discovered a place where I can get 
three for ten cents. They are not so good as the others, 
but they are very warming. 

"And so I have at last found my work in the world, 
thanks to you, young man. It is the Master s work." 
He looked at me, and his eyes twinkled. "You caught 
me feeding his lambs, you know. And of course you 
will all keep my secret." 

He spoke carelessly enough, but there was real fear 
behind the speech. He promised to call upon us again. 
But a week later we read in the newspaper of the sad 
case of Bishop Morehouse, who had been committed to 
the Napa Asylum and for whom there were still hopes 
held out. In vain we tried to see him, to have his case 
reconsidered or investigated. Nor could we learn 
anything about him except the reiterated statements 
that slight hopes were still held for his recovery. 



1 A Mexican dish, referred to occasionally in the literature of the 
times. It is supposed that it was warmly seasoned. No recipe of it 
has come down to us. 



THE BISHOP 203 

"Christ told the rich young man to sell all he had," 
Ernest said bitterly. "The Bishop obeyed Christ s 
injunction and got locked up in a madhouse. Times 
have changed since Christ s day. A rich man to-day 
who gives all he has to the poor is crazy. There is 
no discussion. Society has spoken." 



CHAPTER XIII 

THE GENERAL STRIKE 

OF course Ernest was elected to Congress in the great 
socialist landslide that took place in the fall of 1912. 
One great factor that helped to swell the socialist vote 
was the destruction of Hearst. 1 This the Plutocracy 
found an easy task. It cost Hearst eighteen million 
dollars a year to run his various papers, and this sum, 
and more, he got back from the middle class in pay 
ment for advertising. The source of his financial 
strength lay wholly in the middle class. The trusts 
did not advertise. 2 To destroy Hearst, all that was 
necessary was to take away from him his advertising. 

The whole middle class had not yet been extermi- 

1 William Randolph Hearst a young California millionaire who 
became the most powerful newspaper owner in the country. His 
newspapers were published in all the large cities, and they appealed 
to the perishing middle class and to the proletariat. So large was 
his following that he managed to take possession of the empty shell 
of the old Democratic Party. He occupied an anomalous position, 
preaching an emasculated socialism combined with a nondescript 
sort of petty bourgeois capitalism. It was oil and water, and there 
was no hope for him, though for a short period he was a source of 
serious apprehension to the Plutocrats. 

3 The cost of advertising was amazing in those helter-skelter times. 
Only the small capitalists competed, and therefore they did the ad 
vertising. There being no competition where there was a trust, there 
was no need for the trusts to advertise. 

204 



THE GENERAL STRIKE 205 

nated. The sturdy skeleton of it remained; but it 
was without power. The small manufacturers and 
small business men who still survived were at the com 
plete mercy of the Plutocracy. They had no economic 
nor political souls of their own. When the fiat of the 
Plutocracy went forth, they withdrew their advertise 
ments from the Hearst papers. 

Hearst made a gallant fight. He brought his papers 
out at a loss of a million and a half each month. He 
continued to publish the advertisements for which he 
no longer received pay. Again the fiat of the Plu 
tocracy went forth, and the small business men and 
manufacturers swamped him with a flood of notices 
that he must discontinue running their old advertise 
ments. Hearst persisted. Injunctions were served 
on him. Still he persisted. He received six months 
imprisonment for contempt of court in disobeying the 
injunctions, while he was bankrupted by countless 
" damage suits. He had no chance. The Plutocracy 
had passed sentence on him. The courts were in the 
hands of the Plutocracy to carry the sentence out. 
And with Hearst crashed also to destruction the Demo 
cratic Party that he had so recently captured. 

With the destruction of Hearst and the Democratic 
Party, there were only two paths for his following to 
take. One was into the Socialist Party; the other 
was into the Republican Party. Then it was that we 
socialists reaped the fruit of Hearst s pseudo-socialistic 



206 THE IRON HEEL 

preaching; for the great majority of his followers 
came over to us. 

The expropriation of the farmers that took place at 
this time would also have swelled our vote had it not 
been for the brief and futile rise of the Grange Party. 
Ernest and the socialist leaders fought fiercely to cap 
ture the farmers; but the destruction of the socialist 
press and publishing houses constituted too great a 
handicap, while the mouth-to-mouth propaganda had 
not yet been perfected. So it was that politicians 
like Mr. Calvin, who were themselves farmers long since 
expropriated, captured the farmers and threw their 
political strength away in a vain campaign. 

"The poor farmers," Ernest once laughed savagely; 
"the trusts have them both coming and going." 

And that was really the situation. The seven great 
trusts, working together, had pooled their enormous 
surpluses and made a farm trust. The railroads, con 
trolling rates, and the bankers and stock exchange 
gamesters, controlling prices, had long since bled the 
farmers into indebtedness. The bankers, and all the 
trusts for that matter, had likewise long since loaned 
colossal amounts of money to the farmers. The farmers 
were in the net. All that remained to be done was the 
drawing in of the net. This the farm trust proceeded 
to do. 

The hard times of 1912 had already caused a fright 
ful slump in the farm markets. Prices were now 



THE GENERAL STRIKE, 207 

deliberately pressed down to bankruptcy, while the 
railroads, with extortionate rates, broke the back of 
the farmer-camel. Thus the farmers were compelled 
to borrow more and more, while they were prevented 
from paying back old loans. Then ensued the great 
r foreclosing of mortgages and enforced collection of 
notes. The farmers simply surrendered the land to 
the farm trust. There was nothing else for them to do. 
And having surrendered the land, the farmers next 
went tO : work for the farm trust, becoming managers, 
superintendents, foremen, and common laborers. They 
worked for wages. They became villeins, in short 
serfs bound to the soil by a living wage. They could 
not leave their masters, for their masters composed the 
Plutocracy. They could not go to the cities, for there, 
also, the Plutocracy was in control. They had but 
one alternative, to leave the soil and become va 
grants, in brief, to starve. And even there they were 
frustrated, for stringent vagrancy laws were passed and 
rigidly enforced. 

Of course, here and there, farmers, and even whole 
communities of farmers, escaped expropriation by vir 
tue of exceptional conditions. But they were merely 
strays and did not count, and they were gathered in 
anyway during the following year. 1 

Thus it was that in the fall of 1912 the socialist 

1 The destruction of the Roman yeomanry proceeded far less rap 
idly than the destruction of the American farmers and small capital- 



208 THE IRON HEEL 

leaders, with the exception of Ernest, decided that the 
end of capitalism had come. What of the hard times 
and the consequent vast army of the unemployed; 
what of the destruction of the farmers and the middle 
class; and what of the decisive defeat administered 
all along the line to the labor unions; the socialists 
were really justified in believing that the end of capital 
ism had come and in themselves throwing down the 
gauntlet to the Plutocracy. 

Alas, how we underestimated the strength of the 
enemy ! Everywhere the socialists proclaimed their 
coming victory at the ballot-box, while, in unmistak 
able terms, they stated the situation. The Plutocracy 
accepted the challenge. It was the Plutocracy, weigh 
ing and balancing, that defeated us by dividing our 
strength. It was the Plutocracy, through its secret 
agents, that raised the cry that socialism was sacri 
legious and atheistic; it was the Plutocracy that 
whipped the churches, and especially the Catholic 

ists. There was momentum in the twentieth century, while there 
was practically none in ancient Rome. 

Numbers of the farmers, impelled by an insane lust for the soil, 
and willing to show what beasts they could become, tried to escape 
expropriation by withdrawing from any and all market-dealing. 
They sold nothing. They bought nothing. Among themselves a 
primitive barter began to spring up. Their privation and hardships 
were terrible, but they persisted. It became quite a movement, in 
fact. The manner in which they were beaten was unique and logical 
and simple. The Plutocracy, by virtue of its possession of the gov 
ernment, raised their taxes. It was the weak joint in their armor. 
Neither buying nor selling, they had no money, and in the end their 
land was sold to pay the taxes. 



THE GENERAL STRIKE 209 

Church, into line, and robbed us of a portion of the 
labor vote. And it was the Plutocracy, through its 
secret agents of course, that encouraged the Grange 
Party and even spread it to the cities into the ranks 
of the dying middle class. 

Nevertheless the socialist landslide occurred. But, 
instead of a sweeping victory with chief executive 
officers and majorities in all legislative bodies, we found 
ourselves in the minority. It is true, we elected fifty 
Congressmen; but when they took their seats in the 
spring of 1913, they found themselves without power 
of any sort. Yet they were more fortunate than the 
Grangers, who captured a dozen state governments, 
and who, in the spring, were not permitted to take 
possession of the captured offices. The incumbents 
refused to retire, and the courts were in the hands of 
the Oligarchy. But this is too far in advance of events. 
I have yet to tell of the stirring times of the winter of 
1912. 

The hard times at home had caused an immense 
decrease in consumption. Labor, out of work, had no 
wages with which to buy. The result was that the 
Plutocracy found a greater surplus than ever on its 
hands. This surplus it was compelled to dispose of 
abroad, and, what of its colossal plans, it needed money. 
Because of its strenuous efforts to dispose of the sur 
plus in the world market, the Plutocracy clashed with 
Germany. Economic clashes were usually succeeded 



210 THE IRON HEEL 

by wars, and this particular clash was no exception. 
The great German war-lord prepared, and so did the 
United States prepare. 

The war-cloud hovered dark and ominous. The 
stage was set for a world-catastrophe, for in all the 
world were hard times, labor troubles, perishing middle 
classes, armies of unemployed, clashes of economic 
interests in the world-market, and mutterings and 
rumblings of the socialist revolution. 1 

The Oligarchy wanted the war with Germany. And 
it wanted the war for a dozen reasons. In the juggling 
of events such a war would cause, in the reshuffling of 
the international cards and the making of new treaties 

1 For a long time these mutterings and rumblings had been heard. 
As far back as 1906 A.D., Lord Avebury, an Englishman, uttered the 
following in the House of Lords : " The unrest in Europe, the spread 
of socialism, and the ominous rise of Anarchism, are warnings to the 
governments and the ruling classes that the condition of the working 
classes in Europe is becoming intolerable, and that if a revolution is to 
be avoided some steps must be taken to increase wages, reduce the hours 
of labor, and lower the prices of the necessaries of life." The Wall 
Street Journal, a stock gamesters publication, in commenting upon 
Lord Avebury s speech, said: " These words were spoken by an aristo 
crat and a member of the most conservative body in all Europe. That 
gives them all the more significance. They contain more valuable 
political economy than is to be found in most of the books. They sound a 
note of warning. Take heed, gentlemen of the war and navy depart 
ments!" 

At the same time, Sydney Brooks, writing in America, in Harper s 
Weekly, said : " You will not hear the socialists mentioned in Washing 
ton. Why should you ? The politicians are always the last people 
in this country to see what is going on under their noses. They will jeer 
at me when I prophesy, and prophesy with the utmost confidence, that 
at the next presidential election the socialists will poll over a million 
votes." 



THE GENERAL STRIKE 211 

and alliances, the Oligarchy had much to gain. And, 
furthermore, the war would consume many national 
surpluses, reduce the armies of unemployed that men 
aced all countries, and give the Oligarchy a breathing 
space in which to perfect its plans and carry them out. ; 
Such a war would virtually put the Oligarchy in pos- 
session of the world-market. Also, such a war would 
create a large standing army that need never be dis 
banded, while in the minds of the people would be 
substituted the issue, America versus Germany," in 
place of " Socialism versus Oligarchy." 

And truly the war would have done all these things 
had it not been for the socialists. A secret meeting of 
the Western leaders was held in our four tiny rooms in 
Pell Street. Here was first considered the stand the 
socialists were to take. It was not the first time we 
had put our foot down upon war, 1 but it was the first 
time we had done so in the United States. After our 
secret meeting we got in touch with the national or 
ganization, and soon our code cables were passing back 

1 It was at the very beginning of the twentieth century A.D., that 
the international organization of the socialists finally formulated their 
long-maturing policy on war. Epitomized, their doctrine was: 
" Why should the workingmen of one country fight with the workingmen 
of another country for the benefit of their capitalist masters f" 

On May 21, 1905 A.D., when war threatened between Austria and 
Italy, the socialists of Italy, Austria, and Hungary held a conference 
at Trieste, and threatened a general strike of the workingmen of both 
countries in case war was declared. This was repeated the following 
year, when the "Morocco Affair" threatened to involve France, 
Germany, and England. 



212 THE IRON HEEL 

and forth across the Atlantic between us and the 
International Bureau. 

The German socialists were ready to act with us. 
There were over five million of them, many of them 
in the standing army, and, in addition, they were on 
friendly terms with the labor unions. In both coun 
tries the socialists came out in bold declaration against 
the war and threatened the general strike. And in the 
meantime they made preparation for the general 
strike. Furthermore, the revolutionary parties in all 
countries gave public utterance to the socialist principle 
of international peace that must be preserved at all 
hazards, even to the extent of revolt and revolution at 
home. 

The general strike was the one great victory we 
American socialists won. On the 4th of December 
the American minister was withdrawn from the German 
capital. That night a German fleet made a dash on 
Honolulu, sinking three American cruisers and a 
revenue cutter, and bombarding the city. Next day 
both Germany and the United States declared war, and 
within an hour the socialists called the general strike 
"in both countries. 

For the first time the German war-lord faced the men 
of his empire who made his empire go. Without them 
he could not run his empire. The novelty of the 
situation lay in that their revolt was passive. They 
did not fight. They did nothing. And by doing 



THE GENERAL STRIKE 213 

nothing they tied their war-lord s hands. He would 
have asked for nothing better than an opportunity to 
loose his war-dogs on his rebellious proletariat. But 
this was denied him. He could not loose his war- 
dogs. Neither could he mobilize his army to go forth 
to war, nor could he punish his recalcitrant subjects. 
Not a wheel moved in his empire. Not a train ran, not 
a telegraphic message went over the wires, for the teleg- 
rajmers and railroad men had ceased work along with 
the rest of the population. 

And as it was in Germany, so it was in the United 
States. At last organized labor had learned its lesson. 
Beaten decisively on its own chosen field, it had aban 
doned that field and come over to the political field 
of the socialists ; for the general strike was a political 
strike. Besides, organized labor had been so badly 
beaten that it did not care. It joined in the general 
strike out of sheer desperation. The workers threw 
down their tools and left their tasks by the millions. 
Especially notable were the machinists. Their heads 
were bloody, their organization had apparently been 
destroyed, yet out they came, along with their allies 
in the metal-working trades. 

Even the common laborers and all unorganized labor 
ceased work. The strike had tied everything up so 
that nobody could work. Besides, the women proved 
to be the strongest promoters of the strike. They set 
their faces against the war. They did not want their 



214 THE IRON HEEL 

men to go forth to die. Then, also, the idea of the 
general strike caught the mood of the people. It 
struck their sense of humor. The idea was infectious. 
The children struck in all the schools, and such teachers 
as came, went home again from deserted class rooms. 
The general strike took the form of a great national 
picnic. And the idea of the solidarity of labor, so 
evidenced, appealed to the imagination of all. And, 
finally, there was no danger to be incurred by the 
colossal frolic. When everybody was guilty, how was 
anybody to be punished? 

The United States was paralyzed. No one knew 
what was happening. There were no newspapers, no 
letters, no despatches. Every community was as com 
pletely isolated as though ten thousand miles of pri 
meval wilderness stretched between it and the rest of 
the world. For that matter, the world had ceased to 
exist. And for a week this state of affairs was main 
tained. 

In San Francisco we did not know what was happening 
even across the bay in Oakland or Berkeley. The effect 
on one s sensibilities was weird, depressing. It seemed 
as though some great cosmic thing lay dead. The 
pulse of the land had ceased to beat. Of a truth the 
nation had died. There were no wagons rumbling on 
the streets, no factory whistles, no hum of electricity 
in the air, no passing of street cars, no cries of news 
boys nothing but persons who at rare intervals 



THE GENERAL STRIKE 215 

went by like furtive ghosts, themselves oppressed and 
made unreal by the silence. 

And during that week of silence the Oligarchy was 
taught its lesson. And well it learned the lesson. The 
general strike was a warning. It should never occur 
again. The Oligarchy would see to that. 

At the end of the week, as had been prearranged, the 
telegraphers of Germany and the United States returned 
to their posts. Through them the socialist leaders of 
both countries presented their ultimatum to the rulers. 
The war should be called off, or the general strike would 
continue. It did not take long to come to an under 
standing. The war was declared off, and the popula 
tions of both countries returned to their tasks. 

It was this renewal of peace that brought about the 
alliance between Germany and the United States. 
In reality, this was an alliance between the Emperor 
and the Oligarchy, for the purpose of meeting their 
common foe, the revolutionary proletariat of both 
countries. And it was this alliance that the Oligarchy 
afterward so treacherously broke when the German 
socialists rose and drove the war-lord from his throne. 
It was the very thing the Oligarchy had played for 
the destruction of its great rival in the world-market. 
With the German Ernperor out of the way, Germany 
would have no surplus to sell abroad. By the very 
nature of the socialist state, the German population 
would consume all that it produced. Of course, it 



216 THE IRON HEEL 

would trade abroad certain things it produced for 
things it did not produce ; but this would be quite differ 
ent from an unconsumable surplus. 

"I ll wager the Oligarchy finds justification," Ernest 
said, when its treachery to the German Emperor be 
came known. "As usual, the Oligarchy will believe 
it has done right." 

And sure enough. The Oligarchy s public defence 
for the act was that it had done it for the sake of the 
American people whose interests it was looking out for. 
It had flung its hated rival out of the world-market and 
enabled us to dispose of our surplus in that market. 

"And the howling folly of it is that we are so helpless 
that such idiots really are managing our interests," 
was Ernest s comment. "They have enabled us to 
sell more abroad, which means that we ll be compelled 
to consume less at home." 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE BEGINNING OP THE END 

A early as January, 1913, Ernest saw the true trend 
of affairs, but he could not get his brother leaders to 
see the vision of the Iron Heel that had arisen in his 
brain. They were too confident. Events were rush 
ing too rapidly to culmination. A crisis had come in 
world affairs. The American Oligarchy was practically 
in possession of the world-market, and scores of coun 
tries were flung out of that market with unconsumable 
and unsalable surpluses on their hands. For such 
countries nothing remained but reorganization. They 
could not continue their method of producing surpluses. 
The capitalistic system, so far as they were concerned, 
had hopelessly broken down. 

The reorganization of these countries took the form 
of revolution. It was a time of confusion and violence. 
Everywhere institutions and governments were crash 
ing. Everywhere, with the exception of two or three 
countries, the erstwhile capitalist masters fought 
bitterly for their possessions. But the governments 
were taken away from them by the militant proletariat. 

217 



218 THE IRON HEEL 

At last was being realized Karl Marx s classic: "The 
knell of private capitalist property sounds. The 
expropriators are expropriated." And as fast as 
capitalistic governments crashed, cooperative com 
monwealths arose in their place. 

"Why does the United States lag behind?"; "Get 
busy, you American revolutionists!"; "What s the 
matter with America?" were the messages sent to 
us by our successful comrades in other lands. But we 
could not keep up. The Oligarchy stood in the way. 
Its bulk, like that of some huge monster, blocked our 
path. 

"Wait till we take office in the spring," we answered. 
"Then you ll see." 

Behind this lay our secret. We had won over the 
Grangers, and in the spring a dozen states would pass 
into their hands by virtue of the elections of the pre 
ceding fall. At once would be instituted a dozen 
cooperative commonwealth states. After that, the 
rest would be easy. 

"But what if the Grangers fail to get possession?" 
Ernest demanded. And his comrades called him a 
calamity howler. 

But this failure to get possession was not the chief 
danger that Ernest had in mind. What he foresaw 
was the defection of the great labor unions and the 
rise of the castes. 

"Ghent has taught the oligarchs how to do it," 



THE BEGINNING OF THE END 219 

Ernest said. "I ll wager they ve made a text-book 
out of his Benevolent Feudalism. " 1 

Never shall I forget the night when, after a hot dis 
cussion with half a dozen labor leaders, Ernest turned 
to me and said quietly: "That settles it. The Iron 
Heel has won. The end is in sight." 

This little conference in our home was unofficial ; but 
Ernest, like the rest of his comrades, was working for 
assurances from the labor leaders that they would call 
out their men in the next general strike. O Connor, the 
president of the Association of Machinists, had been 
foremost of the six leaders present in refusing to give 
such assurance. 

"You have seen that you were beaten soundly at 
your old tactics of strike and boycott," Ernest urged. 

O Connor and the others nodded their heads. 

"And you saw what a general strike would do," 
Ernest went on. "We stopped the war with Germany. 
Never was there so fine a display of the solidarity and 
the power of labor. Labor can and will rule the world. 
If you continue to stand with us, we ll put an end to 
the reign of capitalism. It is your only hope. And 

1 " Our Benevolent Feudalism," a book published in 1902 A.D., by 
W. J. Ghent. It has always been insisted that Ghent put the idea of 
the Oligarchy into the minds of the great capitalists. This belief 
persists throughout the literature of the three centuries of the Iron 
Heel, and even in the literature of the first century of the Brotherhood 
of Man. To-day we know better, but our knowledge does not over 
come the fact that Ghent remains the most abused innocent man in 
all history. 



220 THE IRON HEEL 

what is more, you know it. There is no other way out. 
No matter what you do under your old tactics, you are 
doomed to defeat, if for no other reason because the 
masters control the courts." 

" You run ahead too fast," O Connor answered. " You 
don t know all the ways out. There is another way out. 
We know what we re about. We re sick of strikes. 
They ve got us beaten that way to a frazzle. But 
I don t think we ll ever need to call our men out 
again." 

"What is your way out?" Ernest demanded bluntly. 

O Connor laughed and shook his head. "I can tell 
you this much : We ve not been asleep. And we re not 
dreaming now." 

1 As a sample of the decisions of the courts adverse to labor, the 
following instances are given. In the coal-mining regions the em 
ployment of children was notorious. In 1905 A.D., labor succeeded 
in getting a law passed in Pennsylvania providing that proof of the 
age of the child and of certain educational qualifications must accom 
pany the oath of the parent. This was promptly declared unconstitu 
tional by the Luzerne County Court, on the ground that it violated the 
Fourteenth Amendment in that it discriminated between individuals 
of the same class namely, children above fourteen years of age 
and children below. The state court sustained the decision. The 
New York Court of Special Sessions, in 1905 A.D., declared unconsti 
tutional the law prohibiting minors and women from working in fac 
tories after nine o clock at night, the ground taken being that such a 
law was "class legislation." Again, the bakers of that time were 
terribly overworked. The New York Legislature passed a law re 
stricting work in bakeries to ten hours a day. In 1906 A.D., the Su 
preme Court of the United States declared this law to be unconstitu 
tional. In part the decision read : " There is no reasonable ground 
for interfering with the liberty of persons or the right of free contract by 
determining the hours of labor in the occupation of a baker." 



THE BEGINNING OF THE END 221 

"There s nothing to be afraid of, or ashamed of, I 
hope/ Ernest challenged. 

"I guess we know our business best," was the re 
tort. 

"It s a dark business, from the way you hide it," 
Ernest said with growing anger. 

"We ve paid for our experience in sweat and blood, 
and we ve earned all that s coming to us," was the 
reply. "Charity begins at home." 

"If you re afraid to tell me your way out, I ll tell it 
to you." Ernest s blood was up. "You re going in for 
grab-sharing. You ve made terms with the enemy, 
that s what you ve done. You ve sold out the cause 
of labor, of all labor. You are leaving the battle-field 
like cowards." 

"I m not saying anything," O Connor answered 
sullenly. "Only I guess we know what s best for us a 
little bit better than you do." 

I "And you don t care a cent for what is best for the 
rest of labor. You kick it into the ditch." 

"I m not saying anything," O Connor replied, "ex 
cept that I m president of the Machinists Association, 
and it s my business to consider the interests of the 
men I represent, that s all." 

And then, when the labor leaders had left, Ernest, 
with the calmness of defeat, outlined to me the course 
of events to come. 

"The socialists used to foretell with joy," he said, 



222 THE IRON HEEL 

" the coming of the day when organized labor, de 
feated on the industrial field, would come over on to the 
political field. Well, the Iron Heel has defeated the 
labor unions on the industrial field and driven them 
over to the political field; and instead of this being 
joyful for us, it will be a source of grief. The Iron Heel 
learned its lesson. We showed it our power in the 
general strike. It has taken steps to prevent another 
general strike." 

"But how?" I asked. 

"Simply by subsidizing the great unions. They 
won t join in the next general strike. Therefore it 
won t be a general strike." 

"But the Iron Heel can t maintain so costly a pro 
gramme forever," I objected. 

"Oh, it hasn t subsidized all of the unions. That s 
not necessary. Here is what is going to happen. 
Wages are going to be advanced and hours shortened 
in the railroad unions, the iron and steel workers 
unions, and the engineer and machinist unions. In 
these unions more favorable conditions will continue 
to prevail. Membership in these unions will become 
like seats in Paradise." 

"Still I don t see," I objected. "What is to become 
of the other unions ? There are far more unions outside 
of this combination than in it." 

"The other unions will be ground out of existence 
all of them. For, don t you see, the railway men, 



THE BEGINNING OF THE END 223 

machinists and engineers, iron and steel workers, do all 
of the vitally essential work in our machine civilization. 
Assured of their faithfulness, the Iron Heel can snap 
its fingers at all the rest of labor. Iron, steel, coal, 
machinery, and transportation constitute the back 
bone of the whole industrial fabric." 

" But coal?" I queried. " The re are nearly a mill 
ion coal miners." 

"They are practically unskilled labor. They will 
not ccfunt. Their wages will go down and their hours 
will increase. They will be slaves like all the rest of us, 
and they will become about the most bestial of all of 
us. They will be compelled to work, just as the farmers 
are compelled to work now for the masters who robbed 
them of their land. And the same with all the other 
unions outside the combination. Watch them wobble 
and go to pieces, and their members become slaves 
driven to toil by empty stomachs and the law of the 
land. 

"Do you know what will happen to Farley * and his 
strike-breakers? I ll tell you. Strike-breaking as an 
occupation will cease. There won t be any more 
strikes. In place of strikes will be slave revolts. 



1 James Farley a notorious strike-breaker of the period. A 
man more courageous than ethical, and of undeniable ability. He 
rose high under the rule of the Iron Heel and finally was translated into 
the oligarch class. He was assassinated in 1932 by Sarah Jenkins, 
whose husband, thirty years before, had been killed by Farley s strike 
breakers. 



224 THE IRON EEEfc 

Farley and his gang will be promoted to slave-driving. 
Oh, it won t be called that ; it will be called enforcing 
the law of the land that compels the laborers to work. 
It simply prolongs the fight, this treachery of the big 
unions. Heaven only knows now where and when the 
Revolution will triumph." 

"But with such a powerful combination as the Oli 
garchy and the big unions, is there any reason to 
believe that the Revolution will ever triumph?" I 
queried. "May not the combination endure forever?" 

He shook his head. "One of our generalizations is 
that every system founded upon class and caste con 
tains within itself the germs of its own decay. When 
a system is founded upon class, how can caste be pre 
vented ? The Iron Heel will not be able to prevent it, 
and in the end caste will destroy the Iron Heel. The 
oligarchs have already developed caste among them 
selves ; but wait until the favored unions develop caste. 
The Iron Heel will use all its power to prevent it, but 
it will fail. 

"In the favored unions are the flower of the American 
workingmen. They are strong, efficient men. They 
have become members of those unions through com 
petition for place. Every fit workman in the United 
States will be possessed by the ambition to become a 
member of the favored unions. The Oligarchy will 
encourage such ambition and the consequent compe 
tition. Thus will the strong men, who might else be 



THE BEGINNING OF THE END 225 

revolutionists, be won away and their strength used 
to bolster the Oligarchy. 

"On the other hand, the labor castes, the members 
of the favored unions, will strive to make their organ 
izations into close corporations. And they will suc-r 
ceed. Membership in the labor castes will become 
hereditary. Sons will succeed fathers, and there will 
be no inflow of new strength from that eternal reser 
voir of strength, the common people. This will mean 
deterioration of the labor castes, and in the end they 
will become weaker and weaker. At the same time, as 
an institution, they will become temporarily all-powerful. 
They will be like the guards of the palace in old Rome, 
and there will be palace revolutions whereby the labor 
castes will seize the reins of power. And there will 
be counter-palace revolutions of the oligarchs, and some 
times the one, and sometimes the other, will be in power. 
And through it all the inevitable caste-weakening will 
go on, so that in the end the common people will come 
into their own." 

This foreshadowing of a slow social evolution was 
made when Ernest was first depressed by the defection 
of the great unions. I never agreed with him in it, 
and I disagree now, as I write these lines, more heartily 
than ever ; for even now, though Ernest is gone, we are 
on the verge of the revolt that will sweep all oligarchies 
away. Yet I have here given Ernest s prophecy be 
cause it was his prophecy. In spite of his belief in it, 

Q 



226 THE IRON HEEL 

he worked like a giant against it, and he, more than 
any man, has made possible the revolt that even now 
waits the signal to burst forth. 1 

"But if the Oligarchy persists," I asked him that 
evening, "what will become of the great surpluses that 
will fall to its share every year?" 

"The surpluses will have to be expended somehow," 
he answered; "and trust the oligarchs to find a way. 
Magnificent roads will be built. There will be great 
achievements in science, and especially in art. When 
the oligarchs have completely mastered the people, they 
wall have time to spare for other things. They will 
become worshippers of beauty. They will become art- 
lovers. And under their direction, and generously re 
warded, will toil the artists. The result will be great 
art ; for no longer, as up to yesterday, will the artists 
pander to the bourgeois taste of the middle class. It 
will be great art, I tell you, and wonder cities will arise 
that will make tawdry and cheap the cities of old time. 
And in these cities will the oligarchs dwell and worship 
beauty. 2 

" Thus will the surplus be constantly expended while 

1 Everhard s social foresight was remarkable. As clearly as in the 
light of past events, he saw the defection of the favored unions, the 
rise and the slow decay of the labor castes, and the struggle between 
the decaying oligarchs and labor castes for control of the great gov 
ernmental machine. 

2 We cannot but marvel at Everhard s foresight. Before ever the 
thought of wonder cities like Ardis and Asgard entered the minds of 
the oligarchs, Everhard saw those cities and the inevitable necessity 
for their creation. 



THE BEGINNING OF THE END 227 

labor does the work. The building of these great works 
and cities will give a starvation ration to millions of 
common laborers, for the enormous bulk of the surplus 
will compel an equally enormous expenditure, and the 
oligarchs will build for a thousand years ay, for ten 
thousand years. They will build as the Egyptians and 
the Babylonians never dreamed of building ; and when 
the oligarchs have passed away, their great roads and 
their wonder cities will remain for the brotherhood of 
labor to tread upon and dwell within. 1 

" These things the oligarchs will do because they can 
not help doing them. These great works will be the 
form their expenditure of the surplus will take, and in 
the same way that the ruling classes of Egypt of long 
ago expended the surplus they robbed from the people 
by the building of temples and pyramids. Under the 
oligarchs will flourish, not a priest class, but an artist 
class. And in place of the merchant class of bour 
geoisie will be the labor castes. And beneath will be 
the abyss, wherein will fester and starve and rot, and 
ever renew itself, the common people, the great bulk of 
the population. And in the end, who knows in what 
day, the common people will rise up out of the abyss ; 



1 And since that day of prophecy, have passed away the three cen 
turies of the Iron Heel and the four centuries of the Brotherhood of 
Man, and to-day we tread the roads and dwell in the cities that the 
oligarchs built. It is true, we are even now building still more wonder 
ful wonder cities, but the wonder cities of the oligarchs endure, and. 
I write these lines in Ardis, one of the most wonderful of them all. 



228 THE IRON HEEL 

the labor castes and the Oligarchy will crumble away; 
and then, at last, after the travail of the centuries, will 
it be the day of the common man. I had thought to see 
that day ; but now I know that I shall never see it." 

He paused and looked at me, and added : 

"Social evolution is exasperatingly slow, isn t it, 
sweetheart?" 

My arms were about him, and his head was on my 
breast. 

"Sing me to sleep," he murmured whimsically. "I 
have had a visioning, and I wish to forget." 



CHAPTER XV 

LAST DAYS 

IT was near the end of January, 1913, that the 
changed attitude of the Oligarchy toward the favored 
unions was made public. The newspapers published 
information of an unprecedented rise in wages and 
shortening of hours for the railroad employees, the 
iron and steel workers, and the engineers and machin 
ists. But the whole truth was not told. The oligarchs 
did not dare permit the telling of the whole truth. 
In reality, the wages had been raised much higher, 
and the privileges were correspondingly greater. All 
this was secret, but secrets will out. Members of the 
favored unions told their wives, and the wives gossiped, 
and soon all the labor world knew what had happened. 

It was merely the logical development of what in the 
nineteenth century had been known as grab-sharing. 
In the industrial warfare of that time, profit-sharing 
had been tried. That is, the capitalists had striven to 
placate the workers by interesting them financially 
in their work. But profit-sharing, as a system, was 
ridiculous and impossible. Profit-sharing could be 
successful only in isolated cases in the midst of a system 

229 



230 THE IRON HEEL 

of industrial strife ; for if all labor and all capital shared 
profits, the same conditions would obtain as did obtain 
when there was no profit-sharing. 

So, out of the unpractical idea of profit-sharing, arose 
the practical idea of grab-sharing. "Give us more pay 
and charge it to the public," was the slogan of the strong 
unions. And here and there this selfish policy worked 
successfully. In charging it to the public, it was 
charged to the great mass of unorganized labor and of 
weakly organized labor. These workers actually paid 
the increased wages of their stronger brothers who were 
members of unions that were labor monopolies. This 
idea, as I say, was merely carried to its logical conclu 
sion, on a large scale, by the combination of the oli 
garchs and the favored unions. 1 

As soon as the secret of the defection of the favored 
unions leaked out, there were rumblings and mutter- 
ings in the labor world. Next, the favored unions with- 
drew from the international organizations and broke 

1 All the railroad unions entered into this combination with the 
oligarchs, and it is of interest to note that the first definite application 
of the policy of profit-grabbing was made by a railroad union in the 
nineteenth century A.D., namely, the Brotherhood of Locomotive 
Engineers. P. M. Arthur was for twenty years Grand Chief of the 
Brotherhood. After the strike on the Pennsylvania Railroad in 
1877, he broached a scheme to have the Locomotive Engineers 
make terms with the railroads and to "go it alone" so far as the 
rest of the labor unions were concerned. This scheme was eminently 
successful. It was as successful as it was selfish, and out of it was 
coined the word " arthurization," to denote grab-sharing on the 
part of labor unions. This word "arthurization" has long puzzled 
the etymologists, but its derivation, I hope, is now made clear. 



LAST DAYS 231 

off all affiliations. Then came trouble and violence. 
The members of the favored unions were branded as 
traitors, and in saloons and brothels, on the streets and 
at work, and, in fact, everywhere, they were assaulted 
by the comrades they had so treacherously deserted. 

Countless heads were broken, and there were many 
killed. No member of the favored unions was safe. 
They gathered together in bands in order to go to work 
or to "return from work. They walked always in the 
middle of the street. On the sidewalk they were liable 
to have their skulls crushed by bricks and cobblestones 
thrown from windows and house-tops. They were 
permitted to carry weapons, and the authorities aided 
them in every way. Their persecutors were sentenced 
to long terms in prison, where they were harshly 
treated; while no man, not a member of the favored 
unions, was permitted to carry weapons. Violation of 
this law was made a high misdemeanor and punished 
accordingly. I 

Outraged labor continued to wreak vengeance on 
the traitors. Caste lines formed automatically. The 
children of the traitors were persecuted by the children 
of the workers who had been betrayed, until it was 
impossible for the former to play on the streets or to 
attend the public schools. Also, the wives and families 
of the traitors were ostracized, while the corner gro- 
ceryman who sold provisions to them was boycotted. 

As a result, driven back upon themselves from every 



232 THE IRON HEEL 

side, the traitors and their families became clannish. 
Finding it impossible to dwell in safety in the midst of 
the betrayed proletariat, they moved into new locali 
ties inhabited by themselves alone. In this they were 
favored by the oligarchs. Good dwellings, modern and 
sanitary, were built for them, surrounded by spacious 
yards, and separated here and there by parks and 
playgrounds. Their children attended schools espe 
cially built for them, and in these schools manual train 
ing and applied science were specialized upon. Thus, and 
unavoidably, at the very beginning, out of this segre 
gation arose caste. The members of the favored unions 
became the aristocracy of labor. They were set apart 
from the rest of labor. They were better housed, better 
clothed, better fed, better treated. They were grab- 
sharing with a vengeance. 

In the meantime, the rest of the working class was 
more harshly treated. Many little privileges were 
taken away from it, while its wages and its standard of 
living steadily sank down. Incidentally, its public 
schools deteriorated, and education slowly ceased to be 
compulsory. The increase in the younger generation 
of children who could not read nor write was perilous. 

The capture of the world-market by the United States 
had disrupted the rest of the world. Institutions and 
governments were everywhere crashing or transform 
ing. Germany, Italy, France, Australia, and New 
Zealand were busy forming cooperative common- 



LAST DAYS 233 

wealths. The British Empire was falling apart. 
England s hands were full. In India revolt was in full 
swing. The cry in all Asia was, " Asia for the Asiatics !" 
And behind this cry was Japan, ever urging and aiding 
the yellow and brown races against the white. And 
while Japan dreamed of continental empire and strove 
to realize the dream, she suppressed her own prole 
tarian revolution. It was a simple war of the castes, 
Cooh* versus Samurai, and the coolie socialists were 
executed by tens of thousands. Forty thousand were 
killed in the street-fighting of Tokio and in the futile 
assault on the Mikado s palace. Kobe was a shambles ; 
the slaughter of the cotton operatives by machine-guns 
became classic as the most terrific execution ever 
achieved by modern war machines. Most savage of all 
was the Japanese Oligarchy that arose. Japan domi 
nated the East, and took to herself the whole Asiatic 
portion of the world-market, with the exception of 
India. 

England managed to crush her own proletarian revo 
lution and to hold on to India, though she was brought 
to the verge of exhaustion. Also, she was compelled 
to let her great colonies slip away from her. So it 
was that the socialists succeeded in making Australia 
and New Zealand into cooperative commonwealths. 
And it was for the same reason that Canada was lost 
to the mother country. But Canada crushed her own 
socialist revolution, being aided in this by the Iron 



234 THE IRON HEEL 

Heel. At the same time, the Iron Heel helped Mexico 
and Cuba to put down revolt. The result was that the 
Iron Heel was firmly established in the New World. 
It had welded into one compact political mass the 
whole of North America from the Panama Canal to 
the Arctic Ocean. 

And England, at the sacrifice of her great colonies, 
had succeeded only in retaining India. But this was 
no more than temporary. The struggle with Japan and 
the rest of Asia for India was merely delayed. England 
was destined shortly to lose India, while behind that 
event loomed the struggle between a united Asia and 
the world. 

And while all the world was torn with conflict, we of 
the United States were not placid and peaceful. The 
defection of the great unions had prevented our pro 
letarian revolt, but violence was everywhere. In 
addition to the labor troubles, and the discontent of 
the farmers and of the remnant of the middle class, a 
religious revival had blazed up. An offshoot of the 
Seventh Day Adventists sprang into sudden promi 
nence, proclaiming the end of the world. 

"Confusion thrice confounded!" Ernest cried. 
"How can we hope for solidarity with all these cross 
purposes and conflicts?" 

And truly the religious revival assumed formidable 
proportions. The people, what of their wretchedness, 
and of their disappointment in all things earthly, 



LAST DAYS 235 

were ripe and eager for a heaven where industrial 
tyrants entered no more than camels passed through 
needle-eyes. Wild-eyed itinerant preachers swarmed 
over the land ; and despite the prohibition of the civil 
authorities, and the persecution for disobedience, the 
flames of religious frenzy were fanned by countless 
camp-meetings. 

It was the last days, they claimed, the beginning of 
the end of the world. The four winds had been loosed. 
God had stirred the nations to strife. It was a time 
of visions and miracles, while seers and prophetesses 
were legion. The people ceased work by hundreds of 
thousands and fled to the mountains, there to await the 
imminent coming of God and the rising of the hundred 
and forty and four thousand to heaven. But in the 
meantime God did not come, and they starved to death 
in great numbers. In their desperation they ravaged 
the farms for food, and the consequent tumult and 
anarchy in the country districts but increased the 
woes of the poor expropriated farmers. 

Also, the farms and warehouses were the property of 
the Iron Heel. Armies of troops were put into the 
field, and the fanatics were herded back at the bayonet 
point to their tasks in the cities. There they broke out 
in ever recurring mobs and riots. Their leaders were 
executed for sedition or confined in madhouses. Those 
who were executed went to their deaths with all the glad 
ness of martyrs. It was a time of madness. The unrest 



236 THE IRON HEEL 

spread. In the swamps and deserts and waste places, 
from Florida to Alaska, the small groups of Indians 
that survived were dancing ghost dances and waiting 
the coming of a Messiah of their own. 

And through it all, with a serenity and certitude that 
was terrifying, continued to rise the form of that mon 
ster of the ages, the Oligarchy. With iron hand and 
iron heel it mastered the surging millions, out of confu 
sion brought order, out of the very chaos wrought its 
own foundation and structure. 

" Just wait till we get in," the Grangers said 
Calvin said it to us in our Pell Street quarters. "Look 
at the states we ve captured. With you socialists to 
back us, we ll make them sing another song when we 
take office." 

"The millions of the discontented and the impover 
ished are ours," the socialists said. "The Grangers 
have come over to us, the farmers, the middle class, 
and the laborers. The capitalist system will fall to 
pieces. In another month we send fifty men to Con 
gress. Two years hence every office will be ours, 
from the President down to the local dog-catcher." 

To all of which Ernest would shake his head and say : 

"How many rifles have you got? Do you know 
where you can get plenty of lead ? When it comes to 
powder, chemical mixtures are better than mechanical 
mixtures, you take my word." 



CHAPTER XVI 

THE END 

WHEN it came time for Ernest and me to go to Wash 
ington, father did not accompany us. He had become 
enamoured of proletarian life. He looked upon our 
slum neighborhood as a great sociological laboratory, 
and he had embarked upon an apparently endless orgy 
of investigation. He chummed with the laborers, and 
was an intimate in scores of homes. Also, he worked at 
odd jobs, and the work was play as well as learned 
investigation, for he delighted in it and was always 
returning home with copious notes and bubbling over 
with new adventures. He was the perfect scientist. 

There was no need for his working at all, because 
Ernest managed to earn enough from his translating 
to take care of the three of us. But father insisted 
on pursuing his favorite phantom, and a protean phan 
tom it was, judging from the jobs he worked at. I shall 
never forget the evening he brought home his street 
pedler s outfit of shoe-laces and suspenders, nor the 
time I went into the little corner grocery to make some 
purchase and had him wait on me. After that I was 

237 



238 THE IRON HEEL 

not surprised when he tended bar for a week in the 
saloon across the street. He worked as a night watch 
man, hawked potatoes on the street, pasted labels 
in a cannery warehouse, was utility man in a paper- 
box factory, and water-carrier for a street railway &lt; 
construction gang, and even joined the Dishwashers 
Union just before it fell to pieces. 

I think the Bishop s example, so far as wearing 
apparel was concerned, must have fascinated father, 
for he wore the cheap cotton shirt of the laborer and the 
overalls with the narrow strap about the hips. Yet one 
habit remained to him from the old life; he always 
dressed for dinner, or supper, rather. 

I could be happy anywhere with Ernest; and 
father s happiness in our changed circumstances 
rounded out my own happiness. 

"When I was a boy," father said, "I was very curi 
ous. I wanted to know why things were and how 
they came to pass. That was why I became a physi- , 
cist. The life in me to-day is just as curious as it was * 
in my boyhood, and it s the being curious that makes 
life worth living." 

Sometimes he ventured north of Market Street into 
the shopping and theatre district, where he sold papers, 
ran errands, and opened cabs. There, one day, clos 
ing a cab, he encountered Mr. Wickson. In high glee 
father described the incident to us that evening. 

"Wickson looked at me sharply when I closed the 



THE END 239 

door on him, and muttered, Well, I ll be damned. 
Just like that he said it, Well, I ll be damned. His 
face turned red and he was so confused that he forgot 
to tip me. But he must have recovered himself 
quickly, for the cab hadn t gone fifty feet before it 
turned around and came back. He leaned out of the 
door. 

" Look here, Professor/ he said, this is too much. 
What can I do for you ? 

" I closed the cab door for you, I answered. Ac 
cording to common custom you might give me a dime/ 

"Bother that! he snorted. I mean something 
substantial. 

"He was certainly serious a twinge of ossified 
conscience or something; and so I considered with 
grave deliberation for a moment. 

"His face was quite expectant when I began my 
answer, but you should have seen it when I finished. 

" You might give me back my home, I said, and 
my stock in the Sierra Mills. " : 

Father paused. 

"What did he say?" I questioned eagerly. 

"What could he say? He said nothing. But I 
said, I hope you are happy. He looked at me curi 
ously. Tell me, are you happy? I asked. 

"He ordered the cabman to drive on, and went away 
swearing horribly. And he didn t give me the dime, 
much less the home and stock; so you see, my dear, 



240 THE IRON HEEL 

your father s street-arab career is beset with disap 
pointments." 

And so it was that father kept on at our Pell Street 
quarters, while Ernest and I went to Washington. 
Except for the final consummation, the old order had 
passed away, and the final consummation was nearer 
than I dreamed. Contrary to our expectation, no 
obstacles were raised to prevent the socialist Congress 
men from taking their seats. Everything went 
smoothly, and I laughed at Ernest when he looked 
upon the very smoothness as something ominous. 

We found our socialist comrades confident, opti 
mistic of their strength and of the things they would 
accomplish. A few Grangers who had been elected to 
Congress increased our strength, and an elaborate pro 
gramme of what was to be done was prepared by the 
united forces. In all of which Ernest joined loyally and 
energetically, though he could not forbear, now and 
again, from saying, apropos of nothing in particular, 
"When it comes to powder, chemical mixtures are 
better than mechanical mixtures, you take my word." 

The trouble arose first with the Grangers in the va 
rious states they had captured at the last election. 
There were a dozen of these states, but the Grangers 
who had been elected were not permitted to take office. 
The incumbents refused to get out. It was very sim 
ple. They merely charged illegality in the elections 
and wrapped up the whole situation in the interminable 



THE END 241 

red tape of the law. The Grangers were powerless. 
The courts were the last recourse, and the courts were 
in the hands of their enemies. 

This was the moment of danger. If the cheated 
Grangers became violent, all was lost. How we 
socialists worked to hold them back ! There were days 
and nights when Ernest never closed his eyes in sleep. 
The big leaders of the Grangers saw the peril and were 
with us to a man. But it was all of no avail. The 
Oligarchy wanted violence, and it set its agents- 
provocateurs to work. Without discussion, it was the 
agents-provocateurs who caused the Peasant Revolt. 

In a dozen states the revolt flared up. The ex 
propriated farmers took forcible possession of the 
state governments. Of course this was unconstitu 
tional, and of course the United States put its soldiers 
into the field. Everywhere the agents-provocateurs 
urged the people on. These emissaries of the Iron 
Heel disguised themselves as artisans, farmers, and 
farm laborers. In Sacramento, the capital of Cali- 
fornia, the Grangers had succeeded in maintaining 
order. Thousands of secret agents were rushed to the 
devoted city. In mobs composed wholly of themselves, 
they fired and looted buildings and factories. They 
worked the people up until they joined them in the 
pillage. Liquor in large quantities was distributed 
among the slum classes further to inflame their minds. 
And then, when all was ready, appeared upon the 



242 THE IRON HEEL 

scene the soldiers of the United States, who were, in 
reality, the soldiers of the Iron Heel. Eleven thousand 
men, women, and children were shot down on the streets 
of Sacramento or murdered in their houses. The 
national government took possession of the state gov 
ernment, and all was over for California. 

And as with California, so elsewhere. Every Granger 
state was ravaged with violence and washed in blood. 
First, disorder was precipitated by the secret agents 
and the Black Hundreds, then the troops were called 
out. Rioting and mob-rule reigned throughout the 
rural districts. Day and night the smoke of burning 
farms, warehouses, villages, and cities filled the sky. 
Dynamite appeared. Railroad bridges and tunnels 
were blown up and trains were wrecked. The poor 
farmers were shot and hanged in great numbers. 
Reprisals were bitter, and many plutocrats and army 
officers were murdered. Blood and vengeance were 
in men s hearts. The regular troops fought the farm 
ers as savagely as had they been Indians. And the 
regular troops had cause. Twenty-eight hundred of 
them had been annihilated in a tremendous series of 
dynamite explosions in Oregon, and in a similar man 
ner, a number of train loads, at different times and 
places, had been destroyed. So it was that the regular 
troops fought for their lives as well as did the farmers. 

As for the militia, the militia law of 1903 was put 
into effect, and the workers of one state were com- 



THE END 243 

pelled, under pain of death, to shoot down their 
comrade-workers in other states. Of course, the 
militia law did not work smoothly at first. Many 
militia officers were murdered, and many militiamen 
were executed by drumhead court martial. Ernest s 
prophecy was strikingly fulfilled in the cases of Mr. 
Kowalt and Mr. Asmunsen. Both were eligible for 
the militia, and both were drafted to serve in the 
punitive expedition that was despatched from Cali 
fornia against the farmers of Missouri. Mr. Kowalt 
and Mr. Asmunsen refused to serve. They were given 
short shrift. Drumhead court martial was their por 
tion, and military execution their end. They were 
shot with their backs to the firing squad. 

Many young men fled into the mountains to escape 
serving in the militia. There they became outlaws, 
and it was not until more peaceful times that they 
received their punishment. It was drastic. The gov 
ernment issued a proclamation for all law-abiding 
citizens to come in from the mountains for a period 
of three months. When the proclaimed date arrived, 
half a million soldiers were sent into the mountainous 
districts everywhere. There was no investigation, no 
trial. Wherever a man was encountered, he was shot 
down on the spot. The troops operated on the basis 
that no man not an outlaw remained in the mountains. 
Some bands, in strong positions, fought gallantly, but 
in the end every deserter from the militia met death. 



244 THE IRON HEEL 

A more immediate lesson, however, was impressed 
on the minds of the people by the punishment meted 
out to the Kansas militia. The great Kansas Mutiny 
occurred at the very beginning of military operations 
against the Grangers. Six thousand of the militia 
mutinied. They had been for several weeks very tur 
bulent and sullen, and for that reason had been kept 
in camp. Their open mutiny, however, was without 
doubt precipitated by the agents-provocateurs. 

On the night of the 22d of April they arose 
and murdered their officers, only a small remnant of 
the latter escaping. This was beyond the scheme of 
the Iron Heel, for the agents-provocateurs had done 
their work too well. But everything was grist to the 
Iron Heel. It had prepared for the outbreak, and the 
killing of so many officers gave it justification for what 
followed. As by magic, forty thousand soldiers of the 
regular army surrounded the malcontents. It was 
" SL trap. The wretched militiamen found that their 
machine-guns had been tampered with, and that the 
cartridges from the captured magazines did not fit 
their rifles. They hoisted the white flag of surrender, 
but it was ignored. There were no survivors. The 
entire six thousand were annihilated. Common shell 
and shrapnel were thrown in upon them from a dis 
tance, and, when, in their desperation, they charged 
the encircling lines, they were mowed down by the 
machine-guns. I talked with an eye-witness, and he 



THE END 245 

said that the nearest any militiaman approached the 
machine-guns was a hundred and fifty yards. The 
earth was carpeted with the slain, and a final charge of 
cavalry, with trampling of horses hoofs, revolvers, and 
sabres, crushed the wounded into the ground. 

Simultaneously with the destruction of the Grangers 
came the revolt of the coal miners. It was the expir 
ing effort of organized labor. Three-quarters of a 
million of miners went out on strike. But they were 
too widely scattered over the country to advantage 
from their own strength. They were segregated in 
their own districts and beaten into submission. This 
was the first great slave-drive. Pocock 1 won his spurs 
as a slave-driver and earned the undying hatred of the 
proletariat. Countless attempts were made upon his 
life, but he seemed to bear a charmed existence. It 
was he who was responsible for the introduction of the 
Russian passport system among the miners, and the 

1 Albert Pocock, another of the notorious strike-breakers of earlier 
years, who, to the day of his death, successfully held all the coal- 
miners of the country to their task. He was succeeded by his son, 
Lewis Pocock, and for five generations this remarkable line of slave- 
drivers handled the coal mines. The elder Pocock, known as Pocock 
I., has been described as follows : " A long, lean head, semicircled by a 
fringe of brown and gray hair, with big cheek-bones and a heavy chin, 
... a pale face, lustreless gray eyes, a metallic voice, and a languid 
manner." He was born of humble parents, and began his carcor as a 
bartender. He next became a private detective for a street railway 
corporation, and by successive steps developed into a professional 
strike-breaker. Pocock V., the last of the line, was blown up in a pump- 
house by a bomb during a petty revolt of the miners in the Indian 
Territory. This occurred in 2073 A.D. 



246 THE IRON HEEL 

denial of their right of removal from, one part of the 
country to another. 

In the meantime, the socialists held firm. While 
the Grangers expired in flame and blood, and organized 
labor was disrupted, the socialists held their peace 
and perfected their secret organization. In vain the 
Grangers pleaded with us. We rightly contended that 
any revolt on our part was virtually suicide for the 
whole Revolution. The Iron Heel, at first dubious 
about dealing with the entire proletariat at one time, 
had found the work easier than it had expected, and 
would have asked nothing better than an uprising on 
our part. But we avoided the issue, in spite of the 
fact that agents-provocateurs swarmed in our midst. 
In those early days, the agents of the Iron Heel were 
clumsy in their methods. They had much to learn 
and in the meantime our Fighting Groups weeded them 
out. It was bitter, bloody work, but we were fighting 
for life and for the Revolution, and we had to fight 
the enemy with its own weapons. Yet we were fair. 
No agent of the Iron Heel was executed without a 
trial. We may have made mistakes, but if so, very 
rarely. The bravest, and the most combative and 
self-sacrificing of our comrades went into the Fighting 
Groups. Once, after ten years had passed, Ernest 
made a calculation from figures furnished by the chiefs 
of the Fighting Groups, and his conclusion was that 
the average life of a man or woman after becoming a 



THE END 247 

member was five years. The comrades of the Fight 
ing Groups were heroes all, and the peculiar thing 
about it was that they were opposed to the taking of 
life. They violated their own natures, yet they loved 
liberty and knew of no sacrifice too great to make for 
the Cause. 1 

The task we set ourselves was threefold. First,, 
the weeding out from our circles of the secret agents 

* These Fighting groups were modelled somewhat after the Fighting 
Organization of the Russian Revolution, and, despite the unceasing 
efforts of the Iron Heel, these groups persisted throughout the three 
centuries of its existence. Composed of men and women actuated by 
lofty purpose and unafraid to die, the Fighting Groups exercised tre 
mendous influence and tempered the savage brutality of the rulers. 
Not alone was their work confined to unseen warfare with the secret 
agents of the Oligarchy. The oligarchs themselves were compelled 
to listen to the decrees of the Groups, and often, when they disobeyed, 
were punished by death and likewise with the subordinates of the 
oligarchs, with the officers of the army and the leaders of the labor 
castes. 

Stern justice was meted out by these organized avengers, but 
most remarkable was their passionless and judicial procedure. There 
were no snap judgments. When a man was captured he was given 
fair trial and opportunity for defence. Of necessity, many men were 
tried and condemned by proxy, as in the case of General Lampton. 
This occurred in 2138 A.D. Possibly the most bloodthirsty and ma 
lignant of all the mercenaries that ever served the Iron Heel, he was 
informed by the Fighting Groups that they had tried him, found him 
guilty, and condemned him to death and this, after three warnings 
for him to cease from his ferocious treatment of the proletariat. After 
his condemnation he surrounded himself with a myriad protective 
devices. Years passed, and in vain the Fighting Groups strove to 
execute their decree. Comrade after comrade, men and women, 
failed in their attempts, and were cruelly executed by the Oligarchy. 
It was the case of General Lampton that revived crucifixion as a legal 
method of execution. But in the end the condemned man found his 
executioner in the form of a slender girl of seventeen, Madeline Pro- 



248 THE IRON HEEL 

of the Oligarchy. Second, the organizing of the 
Fighting Groups, and, outside of them, of the general 
secret organization of the Revolution. And third, the 
Introduction of our own secret agents into every branch 
of the Oligarchy into the labor castes and especially 
among the telegraphers and secretaries and clerks, into 
the army, the agents-provocateurs, and the slave- 
drivers. It was slow work, and perilous, and often 
were our efforts rewarded with costly failures. 

The Iron Heel had triumphed in open warfare, but 
we held our own in the new warfare, strange and awful 
and subterranean, that we instituted. All was unseen, 
much was unguessed ; the blind fought the blind ; and 
yet through it all was order, purpose, control. We 
permeated the entire organization of the Iron Heel 
with our agents, while our own organization was per- 

Yence, who, to accomplish her purpose, served two years in his palace 
as a seamstress to the household. She died in solitary confinement 
after horrible and prolonged torture ; but to-day she stands in imperish 
able bronze in the Pantheon of Brotherhood in the wonder city of Series. 
We, who by personal experience know nothing of bloodshed, must 
not judge harshly the heroes of the Fighting Groups. They gave up 
their lives for humanity, no sacrifice was too great for them to accom 
plish, while inexorable necessity compelled them to bloody expression 
in an age of blood. The Fighting Groups constituted the one thorn 
in the side of the Iron Heel that the Iron Heel could never remove. 
Ererhard was the father of this curious army, and its accomplishments 
and successful persistence for three hundred years bear witness to the 
\risdom with which he organized and the solid foundation he laid for 
the succeeding generations to build upon. In some respects, despite 
his great economic and sociological contributions, and his work as a 
general leader in the Revolution, his organization of the Fighting 
Groups must be regarded as his greatest achievement. 



THE END 249 

meated with the agents of the Iron Heel. It was war 
fare dark and devious, replete with intrigue and con 
spiracy, plot and counterplot. And behind all, ever 
menacing, was death, violent and terrible. Men and 
women disappeared, our nearest and dearest comrades. 
We saw them to-day. To-morrow they were gone ; 
we never saw them again, and we knew that they had 
died. 

There was no trust, no confidence anywhere. The 
man 1 who plotted beside us, for all we knew, might be 
an agent of the Iron Heel. We mined the organization 
of the Iron Heel with our secret agents, and the Iron 
Heel countermined with its secret agents inside its 
own organization. And it was the same with our 
organization. And despite the absence of confidence 
and trust we were compelled to base our every effort 
on confidence and trust. Often were we betrayed. 
Men were weak. The Iron Heel could offer money, 
leisure, the joys and pleasures that waited in the repose 
of the wonder cities. We could offer nothing but the 
satisfaction of being faithful to a noble ideal. As for 
the rest, the wages of those who were loyal were 
unceasing peril, torture, and death. 

Men were weak, I say, and because of their weakness 
we were compelled to make the only other reward that 
was within our power. It was the reward of death. 
Out of necessity we had to punish our traitors. For 
every man who betrayed us, from one to a dozen faith- 



250 THE IRON HEEL 

ful avengers were loosed upon his heels. We might 
fail to carry out our decrees against our enemies, such 
as the Pococks, for instance; but the one thing we 
could not afford to fail in was the punishment of our 
own traitors. Comrades turned traitor by permission, 
in order to win to the wonder cities and there execute 
our sentences on the real traitors. In fact, so terrible 
did we make ourselves, that it became a greater peril 
to betray us than to remain loyal to us. 

The Revolution took on largely the character of 
religion. We worshipped at the shrine of the Revolu 
tion, which was the shrine of liberty. It was the divine 
flashing through us. Men and women devoted their 
lives to the Cause, and new-born babes were sealed to 
it as of old they had been sealed to the service of God. 
We were lovers of Humanity. 



CHAPTER XVII 

THE SCARLET LIVERY 

WITH the destruction of the Granger states, the 
Grangers in Congress disappeared. They were being 
tried for high treason, and their places were taken by 
the creatures of the Iron Heel. The socialists were in 
a pitiful minority, and they knew that their end was 
near. Congress and the Senate were empty pretences, 
farces. Public questions were gravely debated and 
passed upon according to the old forms, while in reality 
all that was done was to give the stamp of constitutional 
procedure to the mandates of the Oligarchy. 

Ernest was in the thick of the fight when the end 
came. It was in the debate on the bill to assist the 
unemployed. The hard times of the preceding year 
had thrust great masses of the proletariat beneath the 
starvation line, and the continued and wide-reaching 
disorder had but sunk them deeper. Millions of people 
were starving, while the oligarchs and their supporters 
were surfeiting on the surplus. 1 We called these 

1 The same conditions obtained in the nineteenth century A.D., 
under British rule in India. The natives died of starvation by the 
million, while their rulers robbed them of the fruits of their toil and 
expended it on magnificent pageants and mumbo-jumbo fooleries. 
Perforce, in this enlightened age, we have much to blush for in the acts 

251 



252 THE IRON HEEL 

wretched people the people of the abyss, 1 and it was 
to alleviate their awful suffering that the socialists 
had introduced the unemployed bill. But this was 
Hot to the fancy of the Iron Heel. In its own way it 
was preparing to set these millions to work, but the 
way was not our way, wherefore it had issued its 
orders that our bill should be voted down. Ernest and 
his fellows knew that their effort was futile, but they 
were tired of the suspense. They wanted something 
to happen. They were accomplishing nothing, and 
the best they hoped for was the putting of an end to 
the legislative farce in which they were unwilling play 
ers. They knew not what end would come, but they 
never anticipated a more disastrous end than the one 
that did come. 

I sat in the gallery that day. We all knew that some 
thing terrible was imminent. It was in the air, and 
its presence was made visible by the armed soldiers 

of our ancestors. Our only consolation is philosophic. We must ac 
cept the capitalistic stage in social evolution as about on a par with 
the earlier monkey stage. The human had to pass through those 
stages in its rise from the mire and slime of low organic life. It was 
inevitable that much of the mire and slime should cling and be not 
easily shaken off. 

1 The people of the abyss this phrase was struck out by the genius 
of H. G. Wells in the late nineteenth century A.D. Wells was a 
sociological seer, sane and normal as well as warm human. Many 
fragments of his work have come down to us, while two of his greatest 
achievements, "Anticipations" and "Mankind in the Making," 
have come down intact. Before the oligarchs, and before Everhard, 
Wells speculated upon the building of the wonder cities, though in 
his writings they are referred to as " pleasure cities." 



THE SCARLET LIVERY 253 

drawn up in lines in the corridors, and by the officers 
grouped in the entrances to the House itself. The 
Oligarchy was about to strike. Ernest was speaking. 
He was describing the sufferings of the unemployed, as 
if with the wild idea of in some way touching their 
hearts and consciences; but the Republican and 
Democratic members sneered and jeered at him, and 
there was uproar and confusion. Ernest abruptly 
changed front. 

"I know nothing that I may say can influence you," 
he said. "You have no souls to be influenced. You 
are spineless, flaccid things. You pompously call 
yourselves Republicans and Democrats. There is no 
Republican Party. There is no Democratic Party. 
There are no Republicans nor Democrats in this House. 
You are lick-spittlers and panderers, the creatures of 
the Plutocracy. You talk verbosely in antiquated 
terminology of your love of liberty, and all the while 
you wear the scarlet livery of the Iron Heel." 

Here the shouting and the cries of "Order! order!" 
drowned his voice, and he stood disdainfully till the 
din had somewhat subsided. He waved his hand to 
include all of them, turned to his own comrades, and 
said: 

"Listen to the bellowing of the well-fed beasts." 

Pandemonium broke out again. The Speaker rapped 
for order and glanced expectantly at the officers in the 
doorways. There were cries of "Sedition!" and a 



254 THE IRON HEEL 

i 

great, rotund New York member began shouting 
"Anarchist!" at Ernest. And Ernest was not pleasant 
to look at. Every fighting fibre of him. was quivering, 
and his face was the face of a fighting animal, withal 
he was cool and collected. 

"Remember," he said, in a voice that made itself 
heard above the din, "that as you show mercy now to 
the proletariat, some day will that same proletariat 
show mercy to you." 

The cries of "Sedition!" and "Anarchist!" re 
doubled. 

"I know that you will not vote for this bill," Ernest 
went on. "You have received the command from 
your masters to vote against it. And yet you call me 
anarchist. You, who have destroyed the government 
of the people, and who shamelessly flaunt your scarlet 
shame in public places, call me anarchist. I do not 
believe in hell-fire and brimstone ; but in moments like 
this I regret my unbelief. Nay, in moments like this 
I almost do believe. Surely there must be a hell, for 
in no less place could it be possible for you to receive 
punishment adequate to your crimes. So long as you 
exist, there is a vital need for hell-fire in the Cosmos." 

There was movement in the doorways. Ernest, the 
Speaker, all the members turned to see. 

"Why do you not call your soldiers in, Mr. Speaker, 
and bid them do their work?" Ernest demanded. 
"They should carry out your plan with expedition." 



THE SCARLET LIVERY 255 

" There are other plans afoot," was the retort. 
"That is why the soldiers are present." 

"Our plans, I suppose," Ernest sneered. "Assassi 
nation or something kindred." 

But at the word "assassination " the uproar broke 
out again. Ernest could not make himself heard, but 
he remained on his feet waiting for a lull. And then it 
happened. From my place in the gallery I saw nothing 
except the flash of the explosion. The roar of it filled 
my ears and I saw Ernest reeling and falling in a swirl 
of smoke, and the soldiers rushing up all the aisles. 
His comrades were on their feet, wild with anger, 
capable of any violence. But Ernest steadied him 
self for a moment, and waved his arms for silence. 

"It is a plot !" his voice rang out in warning to his 
comrades. "Do nothing, or you will be destroyed." 

Then he slowly sank down, and the soldiers reached 
him. The next moment soldiers were clearing the 
galleries and I saw no more. 

Though he was my husband, I was not permitted 
to get to him. When I announced who I was, I was 
promptly placed under arrest. And at the same time 
were arrested all socialist Congressmen in Washington, 
including the unfortunate Simpson, who lay ill with 
typhoid fever in his hotel. 

The trial was prompt and brief. The men were 
foredoomed. The wonder was that Ernest was not 
executed. This was a blunder on the part of the 



256 THE IRON HEEL 

Oligarchy, and a costly one. But the Oligarchy was 
too confident in those days. It was drunk with suc 
cess, and little did it dream that that small handful 
of heroes had within them the power to rock it to its 
foundations. To-morrow, when the Great Revolt 
breaks out and all the world resounds with the tramp, 
tramp of the millions, the Oligarchy will realize, and 
too late, how mightily that band of heroes has grown. 1 
As a revolutionist myself, as one on the inside who 
knew the hopes and fears and secret plans of the revo 
lutionists, I am fitted to answer, as very few are, the 
charge that they were guilty of exploding the bomb 
in Congress. And I can say flatly, without qualifica 
tion or doubt of any sort, that the socialists, in Congress 

1 Avis Everhard took for granted that her narrative would be read 
in her own day, and so omits to mention the outcome of the trial for 
high treason. Many other similar disconcerting omissions will be 
noticed in the Manuscript. Fifty-two socialist Congressmen were 
tried, and all were found guilty. Strange to relate, not one received 
the death sentence. Everhard and eleven others, among whom were 
Theodore Donnelson and Matthew Kent, received life imprisonment. : 
The remaining forty received sentences varying from thirty to forty- f 
five years; while Arthur Simpson, referred to in the Manuscript as 
being ill of typhoid fever at the time of the explosion, received only 
fifteen years. It is the tradition that he died of starvation in solitary 
confinement, and this harsh treatment is explained as having been 
caused by his uncompromising stubbornness and his fiery and tactless 
hatred for all men that served the despotism. He died in Cabanas 
in Cuba, where three of his comrades were also confined. The fifty- 
two socialist Congressmen were confined in military fortresses scattered 
all over the United States. Thus, Du Bois and Woods were held in 
Porto Rico, while Everhard and Merryweather were placed in Alca- 
traz, an island in San Francisco Bay that had already seen long service 
os a military prison. 



THE SCARLET LIVERY 257 

and out, had no hand in the affair. Who threw the 
bomb we do not know, but the one thing we are abso 
lutely sure of is that we did not throw it. 

On the other hand, there is evidence to show that the 
Iron Heel was responsible for the act. Of course, we 
cannot prove this. Our conclusion is merely presump 
tive. But here are such facts as we do know. It had 
been reported to the Speaker of the House, by secret- 
service agents of the government, that the socialist 
Congressmen were about to resort to terroristic tactics, 
and that they had decided upon the day when their 
tactics would go into effect. This day was the very 
day of the explosion. Wherefore the Capitol had been 
packed with troops in anticipation. Since we knew 
nothing about the bomb, and since a bomb actually 
was exploded, and since the authorities had prepared 
in advance for the explosion, it is only fair to conclude 
that the Iron Heel did know. Furthermore, we charge 
that the Iron Heel was guilty of the outrage, and that 
the Iron Heel planned and perpetrated the outrage for 
the purpose of foisting the guilt on our shoulders and 
so bringing about our destruction. 

From the Speaker the warning leaked out to all the 
creatures in the House that wore the scarlet livery. 
They knew, while Ernest was speaking, that some vio 
lent act was to be committed. And to do them justice, 
they honestly believed that the act was to be com 
mitted by the socialists. At the trial, and still with 



258 THE IRON HEEL 

honest belief, several testified to having seen Ernest 
prepare to throw the bomb, and that it exploded pre 
maturely. Of course they saw nothing of the sort. 
In the fevered imagination of fear they thought they 
saw, that was all. 

As Ernest said at the trial : "Does it stand to reason, 
if I were going to throw a bomb, that I should elect to 
throw a feeble little squib like the one that was thrown ? 
There wasn t enough powder in it. It made a lot of 
smoke, but hurt no one except me. It exploded right 
at my feet, and yet it did not kill me. Believe me, 
when I get to throwing bombs, I ll do damage. There ll 
be more than smoke in my petards." 

In return it was argued by the prosecution that the 
weakness of the bomb was a blunder on the part of the 
socialists, just as its premature explosion, caused by 
Ernest s losing his nerve and dropping it, was a blunder. 
And to clinch the argument, there were the several Con 
gressmen who testified to having seen Ernest fumble 
and drop the bomb. 

As for ourselves, not one of us knew how the bomb 
was thrown. Ernest told me that the fraction of an 
instant before it exploded he both heard and saw it 
strike at his feet. He testified to this at the trial, but 
no one believed him. Besides, the whole thing, in 
popular slang, was " cooked up." The Iron Heel had 
made up its mind to destroy us, and there was no with 
standing it. 



THE SCARLET LIVERY 259 

There is a saying that truth will out. I have come to 
doubt that saying. Nineteen years have elapsed, and 
despite our untiring efforts, we have failed to find the 
man who really did throw the bomb. Undoubtedly 
he was some emissary of the Iron Heel, but he has 
escaped detection. We have never got the slightest 
clew to his identity. And now, at this late date, nothing 
remains but for the affair to take its place among the 
mygteries of history. 1 

1 Avis Everhard would have had to live for many generations ere 
she could have seen the clearing up of this particular mystery. A 
little less than a hundred years ago, and a little more than six hundred 
years after her death, the confession of Pervaise was discovered in the 
secret archives of the Vatican. It is perhaps well to tell a little some 
thing about this obscure document, which, in the main, is of interest 
to the historian only. 

Pervaise was an American, of French descent, who, in 1913 A.D., 
was lying in the Tombs Prison, New York City, awaiting trial for 
murder. From his confession we learn that he was not a criminal. 
He was warm-blooded, passionate, emotional. In an insane fit of 
jealousy he killed his wife a very common act in those times. Per 
vaise was mastered by the fear of death, all of which is recounted at 
length in his confession. To escape death he would have done any 
thing, and the police agents prepared him by assuring him that he 
could not possibly escape conviction of murder in the first degree 
when his trial came off. In those days, murder in the first degree was 
a capital offence. The guilty man or woman was placed in a specially 
constructed death-chair, and, under the supervision of competent phy 
sicians, was destroyed by a current of electricity. This was called 
electrocution, and it was very popular during that period. Anaesthe 
sia, as a mode of compulsory death, was not introduced until later. 

This man, good at heart but with a ferocious animalism close at the 
surface of his being, hang in jail and expectant of nothing less than 
death, was prevailed upon by the agents of the Iron Heel to throw the 
bomb in the House of Representatives. In his confession he states 
explicitly that he was informed that the bomb was to be a feeble thing 
and that no lives would be lost. This is directly in line with the fact 



260 THE IRON HEEL 

that the bomb was lightly charged, and that its explosion at Ever- 
hard s feet was not deadly. 

Pervaise was smuggled into one of the galleries ostensibly closed 
for repairs. He was to select the moment for the throwing of the 
bomb, and he naively confesses that in his interest in Everhard s tirade 
and the general commotion raised thereby, he nearly forgot his mis 
sion. 

Not only was he released from prison in reward for his deed, but 
he was granted an income for life. This he did not long enjoy. In 
1914 A.D., in September, he was striken with rheumatism of the heart 
and lived for three days. It was then that he sent for the Catholic 
priest, Father Peter Durban, and to him made confession. So im 
portant did it seem to the priest, that he had the confession taken down 
in writing and sworn to. What happened after this we can only sur 
mise. The document was certainly important enough to find its way 
to Rome. Powerful influences must have been brought to bear, 
hence its suppression. For centuries no hint of its existence reached 
the world. It was not until in the last century that Lorbia, the bril 
liant Italian scholar, stumbled upon it quite by chance during his 
researches in the Vatican. 

There is to-day no doubt whatever that the Iron Heel was respon 
sible for the bomb that exploded in the House of Representatives in 
1913 A.D. Even though the Pervaise confession had never come to 
light, no reasonable doubt could obtain ; for the act in question, that 
sent fifty-two Congressmen to prison, was on a par with countless 
other acts committed by the oligarchs, and, before them, by the cap 
italists. 

There is the classic instance of the ferocious and wanton judicial 
murder of the innocent and so-called Haymarket Anarchists in Chicago 
in the penultimate decade of the nineteenth century A.D. In a cate 
gory by itself is the deliberate burning and destruction of capitalist 
property by the capitalists themselves see second footnote on page 
172. For such destruction of property innocent men were frequently 
punished "railroaded" in the parlance of the times. 

In the labor troubles of the first decade of the twentieth century 
A.D., between the capitalists and the Western Federation of Miners, 
similar but more bloody tactics were employed. The railroad station 
at Independence was blown up by the agents of the capitalists. Thir 
teen men were killed, and many more were wounded. And then the 
capitalists, controlling the legislative and judicial machinery of the 
state of Colorado, charged the miners with the crime and came very 
aear to convicting them. Romaines, one of the tools in this affair, 



THE SCARLET LIVERY 261 

like Pervaise, was lying in jail in another state, Kansas, awaiting trial, 
when he was approached by the agents of the capitalists. But, unlike 
Pervaise, the confession of Romanies was made public in his own time. 
Then, during this same period, there was the case of Moyer and 
Haywood, two strong, fearless leaders of labor. One was president 
and the other was secretary of the Western Federation of Miners. The 
ex-governor of Idaho had been mysteriously murdered. The crime, 
at the time, was openly charged to the mine owners by the socialists 
and miners. Nevertheless, in violation of the national and state con 
stitutions, and by means of conspiracy on the parts of the governors 
of Idaho and Colorado, Moyer and Haywood were kidnapped, thrown 
into jail, and charged with the murder. It was this instance that pro- 
vok*d from Eugene V. Debs, national leader of the American social 
ists at the time, the following words : " The labor leaders that cannot 
be bribed nor bullied, must be ambushed and murdered. The only crime 
of Moyer and Haywood is that they have been unswervingly true to the 
working class. The capitalists have stolen our country, debauched our 
politics, defiled our judiciary, and ridden over us rough-shod, and now 
they propose to murder those who will not abjectly surrender to their 
brutal dominion. The governors of Colorado and Idaho are but execut 
ing the mandates of their masters, the Plutocracy. The issue is the 
Workers versus the Plutocracy. If they strike the first violent blow, 
we will strike the last." 



CHAPTER XVin 

IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 

OF myself, during this period, there is not much to 
say. For six months I was kept in prison, though 
charged with no crime. I was a suspect a word of 
fear that all revolutionists were soon to come to know. 
But our own nascent secret service was beginning to 
work. By the end of my second month in prison, one 
of the jailers made himself known as a revolutionist 
in touch with the organization. Several weeks later, 
Joseph Parkhurst, the prison doctor who had just been 
appointed, proved himself to be a member of one of the 
Fighting Groups. 

Thus, throughout the organization of the Oligarchy, 
our own organization, weblike and spidery, was in 
sinuating itself. And so I was kept in touch with all 
that was happening in the world without. And fur 
thermore, every one of our imprisoned leaders was in 
contact with brave comrades who masqueraded in the 
livery of the Iron Heel. Though Ernest lay in prison 
three thousand miles away, on the Pacific Coast, I was 
in unbroken communication with him, and our letters 
passed regularly back and forth. 

262 



IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 263 

The leaders, in prison and out, were able to discuss 
and direct the campaign. It would have been pos 
sible, within a few months, to have effected the escape 
of some of them; but since imprisonment proved no 
bar to our activities, it was decided to avoid anything 
premature. Fifty-two Congressmen were in prison, 
and fully three hundred more of our leaders. It was 
planned that they should be delivered simultaneously. 
If part of them escaped, the vigilance of the oligarchs 
might be aroused so as to prevent the escape of the 
remainder. On the other hand, it was held that a 
simultaneous jail-delivery all over the land would have 
immense psychological influence on the proletariat. 
It would show our strength and give confidence. 

So it was arranged, when I was released at the end of 
six months, that I was to disappear and prepare a secure 
hiding-place for Ernest. To disappear was in itself no- 
easy thing. No sooner did I get my freedom than my 
footsteps began to be dogged by the spies of the Iron 
Heel. It was necessary that they should be thrown * 
off the track, and that I should win to California. It 
is laughable, the way this was accomplished. 

Already the passport system, modelled on the Rus 
sian, was developing. I dared not cross the continent 
in my own character. It was necessary that I should 
be completely lost if ever I was to see Ernest again, 
for by trailing me after he escaped, he would be caught 
once more. Again, I could not disguise myself as a pro- 



264 THE IRON HEEL 

letarian and travel. There remained the disguise of a 
member of the Oligarchy. While the arch-oligarchs 
were no more than a handful, there were myriads of 
lesser ones of the type, say, of Mr. Wickson men, 
worth a few millions, who were adherents of the arch- 
oligarchs. The wives and daughters of these lesser oli 
garchs were legion, and it was decided that I should 
assume the disguise of such a one. A few years later 
this would have been impossible, because the passport 
system was to become so perfect that no man, woman, 
nor child in all the land was unregistered and unac 
counted for in his or her movements. 

When the time was ripe, the spies were thrown off 
my track. An hour later Avis Everhard was no more. 
At that time one Felice Van Verdighan, accompanied 
by two maids and a lap-dog, with another maid for the 
lap-dog, 1 entered a drawing-room on a Pullman, 2 and 
a few minutes later was speeding west. 

The three maids who accompanied me were revo 
lutionists. Two were members of the Fighting Groups, 
and the third, Grace Holbrook, entered a group the 
following year, and six months later was. executed by the 

1 This ridiculous picture well illustrates the heartless conduct of the 
masters. While people starved, lap-dogs were waited upon by maids. 
This was a serious masquerade on the part of Avis Everhard. Life and 
death and the Cause were in the issue; therefore the picture must be 
accepted as a true picture. It affords a striking commentary of the 
times. 

2 Pullman the designation of the more luxurious railway cars 
of the period and so named from the inventor. 



IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 265 

Iron Heel. She it was who waited upon the dog. Of 
the other two, Bertha Stole disappeared twelve years 
later, while Anna Roylston still lives and plays an 
increasingly important part in the Revolution. 1 

Without adventure we crossed the United States to 
California. When the train stopped at Sixteenth Street 
Station, in Oakland, we alighted, and there Felice Van 
Verdighan, with her two maids, her lap-dog, and her 
lap?dog s maid, disappeared forever. The maids, 
guided by trusty comrades, were led away. Other com 
rades took charge of me. Within half an hour after 
leaving the train I was on board a small fishing boat 
and out on the waters of San Francisco Bay. The 
winds baffled, and we drifted aimlessly the greater part 
of the night. But I saw the lights of Alcatraz where 
Ernest lay, and found comfort in the thought of near 
ness to him. By dawn, what with the rowing of the 
fishermen, we made the Marin Islands. Here we lay 
in hiding all day, and on the following night, swept on 
by a flood tide and a fresh wind, we crossed San Pablo 
Bay in two hours and ran up Petaluma Creek. 

1 Despite continual and almost inconceivable hazards, Anna 
Roylston lived to the royal age of ninety-one. As the Pococks defied 
the executioners of the Fighting Groups, so she defied the executioners 
of the Iron Heel. She bore a charmed life and prospered amid dangers 
and alarms. She herself was an executioner for the Fighting Groups, 
and, known as the Red Virgin, she became one of the inspired figures 
of the Revolution. When she was an old woman of sixty-nine sho 
shot "Bloody" Halcliffe down in the midst of his armed escort and 
got away unscathed. In the end she died peaceably of old age in a 
secret refuge of the revolutionists in the Ozark mountains. 



266 THE IRON HEEL 

Here horses were ready and another comrade, and 
without delay we were away through the starlight. 
To the north I could see the loom of Sonoma Moun 
tain, toward which we rode. We left the old town of 
Sonoma to the right and rode up a canyon that lay 
between outlying buttresses of the mountain. The 
wagon-road became a wood-road, the wood-road be 
came a cow-path, and the cow-path dwindled away 
and ceased among the upland pastures. Straight over 
Sonoma Mountain we rode. It was the safest route. 
There was no one to mark our passing. 

Dawn caught us on the northern brow, and in the gray 
light we dropped down through chaparral into red 
wood canyons deep and warm with the breath of pass 
ing summer. It was old country to me that I knew and 
loved, and soon I became the guide. The hiding-place 
was mine. I had selected it. We let down the bars 
and crossed an upland meadow. Next, we went over 
a low, oak-covered ridge and descended into a smaller 
meadow. Again we climbed a ridge, this time riding 
under red-limbed madronos and manzanitas of deeper 
red. The first rays of the sun streamed upon our backs 
as we climbed. A flight of quail thrummed off through 
the thickets. A big jack-rabbit crossed our path, leap 
ing swiftly and silently like a deer. And then a deer, 
a many-pronged buck, the sun flashing red-gold from 
neck and shoulders, cleared the crest of the ridge before 
us and was gone. 



IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 267 

We followed in his wake a space, then dropped down 
a zigzag trail that he disdained into a group of noble 
redwoods that stood about a pool of water murky with 
minerals from the mountain side. I knew every inch 
of the way. Once a writer friend of mine had owned 
the ranch; but he, too, had become a revolutionist, 
though more disastrously than I, for he was already 
dead and gone, and none knew where nor how. He 
along, in the days he had lived, knew the secret of the 
hiding-place for which I was bound. He had bought 
the ranch for beauty, and paid a round price for it, 
much to the disgust of the local farmers. He used to 
tell with great glee how they were wont to shake their 
heads mournfully at the price, to accomplish ponder 
ously a bit of mental arithmetic, and then to say, 
"But you can t make six per cent on it." 

But he was dead now, nor did the ranch descend to 
his children. Of all men, it was now the property of 
Mr. Wickson, who owned the whole eastern and north 
ern slopes of Sonoma Mountain, running from the 
Spreckels estate to the divide of Bennett Valley. Out 
of it he had made a magnificent deer-park, where, over 
thousands of acres of sweet slopes and glades and can 
yons, the deer ran almost in primitive wildness. The 
people who had owned the soil had been driven away. 
A state home for the feeble-minded had also been de 
molished to make room for the deer. 

To cap it all, Wickson s hunting lodge was a quarter 



268 THE IRON HEEL 

of a mile from, my hiding-place. This, instead of being 
a danger, was an added security. We were sheltered 
under the very aegis of one of the minor oligarchs. 
Suspicion, by the nature of the situation, was turned 
aside. The last place in the world the spies of the 
Iron Heel would dream of looking for me, and for Ernest 
when he joined me, was Wickson s deer-park. 

We tied our horses among the redwoods at the pool. 
From a cache behind a hollow rotting log my com 
panion brought out a variety of things, a fifty-pound 
sack of flour, tinned foods of all sorts, cooking utensils, 
blankets, a canvas tarpaulin, books and writing ma 
terial, a great bundle of letters, a five-gallon can of 
kerosene, an oil stove, and, last and most important, 
a large coil of stout rope. So large was the supply of 
things that a number of trips would be necessary to 
carry them to the refuge. 

But the refuge was very near. Taking the rope and 
leading the way, I passed through a glade of tangled 
vines and bushes that ran between two wooded knolls. 
The glade ended abruptly at the steep bank of a stream. 
It was a little stream, rising from springs, and the 
hottest summer never dried it up. On every hand 
were tall wooded knolls, a group of them, with all the 
seeming of having been flung there from some care 
less Titan s hand. There was no bed-rock in them. 
They rose from their bases hundreds of feet, and they 
were composed of red volcanic earth, the famous wine- 



IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 269 

soil of Sonoma. Through these the tiny stream had 
cut its deep and precipitous channel. 

It was quite a scramble down to the stream bed, and, 
once on the bed, we went down stream perhaps for a 
hundred feet. And then we came to the great hole. 
There was no warning of the existence of the hole, nor 
was it a hole in the common sense of the word. One 
crawled through tight-locked briers and branches, and 
found oneself on the very edge, peering out and down 
through a green screen. A couple of hundred feet in 
length and width, it was half of that in depth. Possibly 
because of some fault that had occurred when the 
knolls were flung together, and certainly helped by 
freakish erosion, the hole had been scooped out in the 
course of centuries by the wash of water. Nowhere did 
the raw earth appear. All was garmented by vege 
tation, from tiny maiden-hair and gold-back ferns to 
mighty redwoods and Douglas spruces. These great 
trees even sprang out from the walls of the hole. Some 
leaned over at angles as great as forty-five degrees, 
though the majority towered straight up from the soft 
and almost perpendicular earth walls. 

It was a perfect hiding-place. No one ever came 
there, not even the village boys of Glen Ellen. Had 
this hole existed in the bed of a canyon a mile long, 
or several miles long, it would have been well known. 
But this was no canyon. From beginning to end the 
length of the stream was no more than five hundred 



270 THE IRON HEEL 

yards. Three hundred yards above the hole the stream 
took its rise in a spring at the foot of a flat meadow. 
A hundred yards below the hole the stream ran out 
into open country, joining the main stream and flowing 
across rolling and grass-covered land. 

My companion took a turn of the rope around a tree, * 
and with me fast on the other end lowered away. In 
no time I was on the bottom. And in but a short while 
he had carried all the articles from the cache and 
lowered them down to me. He hauled the rope up and 
hid it, and before he went away called down to me a 
cheerful parting. 

Before I go on I want to say a word for this comrade, 
John Carlson, a humble figure of the Revolution, one of 
the countless faithful ones in the ranks. He worked 
for Wickson, in the stables near the hunting lodge. 
In fact, it was on Wickson s horses that we had ridden 
over Sonoma Mountain. For nearly twenty years now 
John Carlson has been custodian of the refuge. No 
thought of disloyalty, I am sure, has ever entered his 
mind during all that time. To betray his trust would 
have been in his mind a thing undreamed. He was 
phlegmatic, stolid to such a degree that one could not 
but wonder how the Revolution had any meaning to 
him at all. And yet love of freedom glowed sombrely 
and steadily in his dim soul. In ways it was indeed 
good that he was not flighty and imaginative. He 
never lost his head. He could obey orders, and he was 



IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 271 

neither curious nor garrulous. Once I asked how it 
was that he was a revolutionist. 

"When I was a young man I was a soldier," was his 
answer. "It was in Germany. There all young men 
must be in the army. So I was in the army. There 
was another soldier there, a young man, too. His 
father was what you call an agitator, and his father was 
in jail for lese majesty what you call speaking the 
truth about the Emperor. And the young man, the 
son, talked with me much about people, and work, and 
the robbery of the people by the capitalists. He made 
me see things in new ways, and I became a socialist. 
His talk was very true and good, and I have never for 
gotten. When I came to the United States I hunted 
up the socialists. I became a member of a section 
that was in the day of the S. L. P. Then later, when 
the split came, I joined the local of the S. P. I 
was working in a livery stable in San Francisco then. 
That was before the Earthquake. I have paid my dues 
for twenty-two years. I am yet a member, and I yet 
pay my dues, though it is very secret now. I will 
always pay my dues, and when the cooperative com 
monwealth comes, I will be glad." 

Left to myself, I proceeded to cook breakfast on the 
oil stove and to prepare my home. Often, in the early 
morning, or in the evening after dark, Carlson would 
steal down to the refuge and work for a couple of hours. 
At first my home was the tarpaulin. Later, a small 



272 THE IRON HEEL 

tent was put up. And still later, when we became as* 
sured of the perfect security of the place, a small house 
was erected. This house was completely hidden from 
any chance eye that might peer down from the edge 
of the hole. The lush vegetation of that sheltered 
spot made a natural shield. Also, the house was built 
against the perpendicular wall; and in the wall itself, 
shored by strong timbers, well drained and ventilated, 
we excavated two small rooms. Oh, believe me, we 
had many comforts. When Biedenbach, the German 
terrorist, hid with us some time later, he installed a 
smoke-consuming device that enabled us to sit by 
crackling wood fires on winter nights. 

And here I must say a word for that gentle-souled 
terrorist, than whom there is no comrade in the Revo 
lution more fearfully misunderstood. Comrade Bieden 
bach did not betray the Cause. Nor was he executed 
by the comrades as is commonly supposed. This 
canard was circulated by the creatures of the Oligarchy. 
Comrade Biedenbach was absent-minded, forgetful. 
He was shot by one of our lookouts at the cave-refuge 
at Carmel, through failure on his part to remember the 
secret signals. It was all a sad mistake. And that he 
betrayed his Fighting Group is an absolute lie. No 
truer, more loyal man ever labored for the Cause. 1 

1 Search as we may through all the material of those times that has 
come down to us, we can find no clew to the Biedenbach here referred. 
to. No mention is made of him anywhere save in the Everhard Manu 
script . 



IN THE SHADOW OF SONOMA 273 

For nineteen years now the refuge that I selected has 
been almost continuously occupied, and in all that time, 
with one exception, it has never been discovered by an 
outsider. And yet it was only a quarter of a mile from 
Wickson s hunting-lodge, and a short mile from the 
village of Glen Ellen. I was able, always, to hear the 
morning and evening trains arrive and depart, and I used 
to set my watch by the whistle at the brickyards. 1 

1 Jf the curious traveller will turn south from Glen Ellen, he will 
find himself on a boulevard that is identical with the old county road 
of seven centuries ago. A quarter of a mile from Glen Ellen, after 
the second bridge is passed, to the right will be noticed a barranca that 
runs like a scar across the rolling land toward a group of wooded knolls. 
The barranca is the site of the ancient right of way that in the time of 
private property in land ran across the holding of one Chauvet, a 
French pioneer of California who came from his native country in the 
fabled days of gold. The wooded knolls are the same knolls referred 
to by Avis Everhard. 

The Great Earthquake of 2368 A.D. broke off the side of one of 
these knolls and toppled it into the hole where the Everhards made 
their refuge. Since the finding of the Manuscript excavations have 
been made, and the house, the two cave rooms, and all the accumu 
lated rubbish of long occupancy have been brought to light. Many 
valuable relics have been found, among which, curious to relate, is 
the smoke-consuming device of Biedenbach s mentioned in the narra 
tive. Students interested in such matters should read the brochure 
of Arnold Bentham soon to be published. 

A mile northwest from the wooded knolls brings one to the site of 
Wake Robin Lodge at the junction of Wild- Water and Sonoma Creeks. 
It may be noticed, in passing, that Wild- Water was originally called 
Graham Creek and was so named on the early local maps. But the 
later name sticks. It was at Wake Robin Lodge that Avis Everhard 
later lived for short periods, when, disguised as an agent-provocateur 
of the Iron Heel, she was enabled to play with impunity her part among 
men and events. The official permission to occupy Wake Robin 
Lodge is still on the records, signed by no less a man than Wickson, 
the minor oligarch of the Manuscript. 
T 



CHAPTER XIX 

TRANSFORMATION 

"You must make yourself over again," Ernest wrote 
to me. "You must cease to be. You must become 
another woman and not merely in the clothes you 
wear, but inside your skin under the clothes. You 
must make yourself over again so that even I would not 
know you your voice, your gestures, your manner 
isms, your carriage, your walk, everything." 

This command I obeyed. Every day I practised foi 
hours in burying forever the old Avis Everhard beneath 
the skin of another woman whom I may call my other 
self. It was only by long practice that such results 
could be obtained. In the mere detail of voice intona 
tion I practised almost perpetually till the voice of my 
new self became fixed, automatic. It was this auto 
matic assumption of a role that was considered imper 
ative. One must become so adept as to deceive one 
self. It was like learning a new language, say the 
French. At first speech in French is self-conscious, a 
matter of the will. The student thinks in English and 

274 



TRANSFORMATION 275 

then transmutes into French, or reads in French but 
transmutes into English before he can understand. 
Then later, becoming firmly grounded, automatic, the 
student reads, writes, and thinks in French, without any 
recourse to English at all. 

And so with our disguises. It was necessary for us 
to practise until our assumed r61es became real ; until 
to be our original selves would require a watchful and 
strpng exercise of will. Of course, at first, much was 
mere blundering experiment. We were creating a new 
art, and we had much to discover. But the work was 
going on everywhere ; masters in the art were develop 
ing, and a fund of tricks and expedients was being ac 
cumulated. This fund became a sort of text-book that 
was passed on, a part of the curriculum, as it were, of 
the school of Revolution. 1 

It was at this time that my father disappeared. 
His letters, which had come to me regularly, ceased. 
He no longer appeared at our Pell Street quarters. 
Our comrades sought him everywhere. Through our 
secret service we ransacked every prison in the land. 
But he was lost as completely as if the earth had swal- 

1 Disguise did become a veritable art during that period. The 
revolutionists maintained schools of acting in all their refuges. They 
scorned accessories, such as wigs and beards, false eyebrows, and such 
aids of the theatrical actors. The game of revolution was a game of 
life and death, and mere accessories were traps. Disguise had to be 
fundamental, intrinsic, part and parcel of one s being, second nature. 
The Red Virgin is reported to have been one of the most adept in the 
art, to which must be ascribed her long and successful career. 



276 THE IRON HEEL 

lowed him up, and to this day no clew to his end has ever 
been discovered. 1 

Six lonely months I spent in the refuge, but they were 
not idle months. Our organization went on apace, and 
there were mountains of work always waiting to be 
done. Ernest and his fellow-leaders, from their prisons, 
decided what should be done ; and it remained for us on 
the outside to do it. There was the organization of the 
mouth-to-mouth propaganda; the organization, with 
all its ramifications, of our spy system; the establish 
ment of our secret printing-presses ; and the establish 
ment of our underground railways, which meant the 
knitting together of all our myriads of places of refuge, 
and the formation of new refuges where links were 
missing in the chains we ran over all the land. 

So I say, the work was never done. At the end of six 
months my loneliness was broken by the arrival of two 
comrades. They were young girls, brave souls and 
passionate lovers of liberty: Lora Peterson, who dis 
appeared in 1922, and Kate Bierce, who later married 
Du Bois, 2 and who is still with us with eyes lifted to 
to-morrow s sun, that heralds in the new age. 

1 Disappearance was one of the horrors of the time. As a motif, 
in song and story, it constantly crops up. It was an inevitable con 
comitant of the subterranean warfare that raged through those three 
centuries. This phenomenon was almost as common in the oligarch 
class and the labor castes, as it was in the ranks of the revolutionists. 
Without warning, without trace, men and women, and even children, 
disappeared and were seen no more, their ends shrouded in mystery. 

1 Du Bois, the present librarian of Ardis, is a lineal descendant 
of this revolutionary pair. 



TRANSFORMATION 277 

The two girls arrived in a flurry of excitement, danger, 
and sudden death. In the crew of the fishing boat that 
conveyed them across San Pablo Bay was a spy. A 
creature of the Iron Heel, he had successfully mas 
queraded as a revolutionist and penetrated deep into the 
secrets of our organization. Without doubt he was on 
my trail, for we had long since learned that my dis 
appearance had been cause of deep concern to the 
secret service of the Oligarchy. Luckily, as the out 
come proved, he had not divulged his discoveries to 
any one. He had evidently delayed reporting, pre 
ferring to wait until he had brought things to a success 
ful conclusion by discovering my hiding-place and cap 
turing me. His information died with him. Under 
some pretext, after the girls had landed at Petaluma 
Creek and taken to the horses, he managed to get away 
from the boat. 

Part way up Sonoma Mountain, John Carlson let the 
girls go on, leading his horse, while he went back on 
foot. His suspicions had been aroused. He captured 
the spy, and as to what then happened, Carlson gave 
us a fair idea. 

"I fixed him," was Carlson s unimaginative way of 
describing the affair. "I fixed him," he repeated, while 
a sombre light burnt in his eyes, and his huge, toil- 
distorted hands opened and closed eloquently. "He 
made no noise. I hid him, and to-night I will go back 
and bury him deep." 



278 THE IRON HEEL 

During that period I used to marvel at my own 
metamorphosis. At times it seemed impossible, either 
that I had ever lived a placid, peaceful life in a college 
town, or else that I had become a revolutionist inured to 
scenes of violence and death. One or the other could 
not be. One was real, the other was a dream, but which 
was which? Was this present life of a revolutionist, 
hiding in a hole, a nightmare ? or was I a revolutionist 
who had somewhere, somehow, dreamed that in some 
former existence I had lived in Berkeley and never 
known of life more violent than teas and dances, de 
bating societies, and lecture rooms? But then I sup 
pose this was a common experience of all of us who had 
rallied under the red banner of the brotherhood of man. 

I often remembered figures from that other life, 
and, curiously enough, they appeared and disappeared, 
now and again, in my new life. There was Bishop 
Morehouse. In vain we searched for him after our or 
ganization had developed. He had been transferred 
from asylum to asylum. We traced him from the state 
hospital for the insane at Napa to the one in Stockton, 
and from there to the one in the Santa Clara Valley 
called Agnews, and there the trail ceased. There was 
no record of his death. In some way he must have 
escaped. Little did I dream of the awful manner in 
which I was to see him once again the fleeting glimpse 
of him in the whirlwind carnage of the Chicago Com 
mune. 



TRANSFORMATION 279 

Jackson, who had lost his arm in the Sierra Mills 
and who had been the cause of my own conversion into 
a revolutionist, I never saw again; but we all knew 
what he did before he died. He never joined the 
revolutionists. Embittered by his fate, brooding over 
his wrongs, he became an anarchist not a philo 
sophic anarchist, but a mere animal, mad with hate 
and lust for revenge. And well he revenged himself. 
Evading the guards, in the night-time while all were 
asleep, he blew the Pertonwaithe palace into atoms. 
Not a soul escaped, not even the guards. And in prison, 
while awaiting trial, he suffocated himself under his 
blankets. 

Dr. Hammerfield and Dr. Ballingford achieved quite 
different fates from that of Jackson. They have been 
faithful to their salt, and they have been correspond 
ingly rewarded with ecclesiastical palaces wherein they 
dwell at peace with the world. Both are apologists 
for the Oligarchy. Both have grown very fat. "Dr. 
Hammerfield," as Ernest once said, "has succeeded in 
modifying his metaphysics so as to give God s sanction 
to the Iron Heel, and also to include much worship of 
beauty and to reduce to an invisible wraith the gaseous 
vertebrate described by Haeckel the difference be 
tween Dr. Hammerfield and Dr. Ballingford being that 
the latter has made the God of the oligarchs a little 
more gaseous and a little less vertebrate." 

Peter Donnelly, the scab foreman at the Sierra Mills 



280 THE IRON HEEL 

whom I encountered while investigating the case of 
Jackson, was a surprise to all of us. In 1918 I was 
present at a meeting of the Frisco Reds. Of all our 
Fighting Groups this one was the most formidable, 
ferocious, and merciless. It was really not a part of 
bur organization. Its members were fanatics, mad 
men. We dared not encourage such a spirit. On the 
other hand, though they did not belong to us, we re 
mained on friendly terms with them. It was a matter 
of vital importance that brought me there that night. 
I, alone in the midst of a score of men, was the only 
person unmasked. After the business that brought 
me there was transacted, I was led away by one of 
them. In a dark passage this guide struck a match, 
and, holding it close to his face, slipped back his mask. 
For a moment I gazed upon the passion-wrought 
features of Peter Donnelly. Then the match went 
out. 

"I just wanted you to know it was me," he said in 
the darkness. "D you remember Dallas, the superin 
tendent?" 

I nodded at recollection of the vulpine-faced super 
intendent of the Sierra Mills. 

"Well, I got him first," Donnelly said with pride. 
" Twas after that I joined the Reds." 

"But how comes it that you are here?" I queried. 
"Your wife and children?" 

"Dead," he answered. "That s why. No," he 



TRANSFORMATION 281 

went on hastily, " tis not revenge for them. They died 
easily in their beds sickness, you see, one time and 
another. They tied my arms while they lived. And 
now that they re gone, tis revenge for my blasted man- 
,hood I m after. I was once Peter Donnelly, the scab 
foreman. But to-night I m Number 27 of the Frisco 
Reds. Come on now, and I ll get you out of this." 

More I heard of him afterward. In his own way 
he had told the truth when he said all were dead. But 
one lived, Timothy, and him his father considered dead 
because he had taken service with the Iron Heel in the 
Mercenaries. 1 A member of the Frisco Reds pledged 
himself to twelve annual executions. The penalty for 
failure was death. A member who failed to complete 
his number committed suicide. These executions were 
not haphazard. This group of madmen met frequently 
and passed wholesale judgments upon offending mem 
bers and servitors of the Oligarchy. The executions 
were afterward apportioned by lot. 

In fact, the business that brought me there the night 
of my visit was such a trial. One of our own comrades, 
who for years had successfully maintained himself in a 

1 In addition to the labor castes, there arose another caste, the 
military. A standing army of professional soldiers was created, offi 
cered by members of the Oligarchy and known as the Mercenaries. 
This institution took the place of the militia, which had proved im 
practicable under the new regime. Outside the regular secret service 
of the Iron Heel, there was further established a secret service of the 
Mercenaries, this latter forming a connecting link between the police 
and the military. 



282 THE IRON HEE1 

clerical position in the local bureau of the secret service 
of the Iron Heel, had fallen under the ban of the Frisco 
Reds and was being tried. Of course he was not pres 
ent, and of course his judges did not know that he was 
one of our men. My mission had been to testify to his 
identity and loyalty. It may be wondered how we 
came to know of the affair at all. The explanation is 
simple. One of our secret agents was a member of the 
Frisco Reds. It was necessary for us to keep an eye 
on friend as well as foe, and this group of madmen was 
not too unimportant to escape our surveillance. 

But to return to Peter Donnelly and his son. All 
went well with Donnelly until, in the following year, he 
found among the sheaf of executions that fell to him 
the name of Timothy Donnelly. Then it was that 
that family clannishness, which was his to so extraordi 
nary a degree, asserted itself. To save his son, he be 
trayed his comrades. In this he was partially blocked, 
but a dozen of the Frisco Reds were executed, and the 
group was well-nigh destroyed. In retaliation, the 
survivors meted out to Donnelly the death he had 
earned by his treason. 

Nor did Timothy Donnelly long survive. The Frisco 
Reds pledged themselves to his execution. Every ef 
fort was made by the Oligarchy to save him. He was 
transferred from one part of the country to another. 
Three of the Reds lost their lives in vain efforts to get 
him. The Group was composed only of men. In the 



TRANSFORMATION 283 

end they fell back on a woman, one of our comrades, 
and none other than Anna Roylston. Our Inner Circle 
forbade her, but she had ever a will of her own and dis 
dained discipline. Furthermore, she was a genius and 
lovable, and we could never discipline her anyway. 
She is in a class by herself and not amenable to the 
ordinary standards of the revolutionists. 

Despite our refusal to grant permission to do the 
deed, ehe went on with it. Now Anna Roylston was a 
fascinating woman. All she had to do was to beckon 
a man to her. She broke the hearts of scores of our 
young comrades, and scores of others she captured, and 
by their heart-strings led into our organization. Yet 
she steadfastly refused to marry. She dearly loved 
children, but she held that a child of her own would 
claim her from the Cause, and that it was the Cause to 
which her life was devoted. 

It was an easy task for Anna Roylston to win Timothy 
7 Donnelly. Her conscience did not trouble her, for at 
that very time occurred the Nashville Massacre, when 
the Mercenaries, Donnelly in command, literally mur 
dered eight hundred weavers of that city. But she 
did not kill Donnelly. She turned him over, a prisoner, 
to the Frisco Reds. This happened only last year, 
and now she has been renamed. The revolutionists 
everywhere are calling her the "Red Virgin." 1 

1 It was not until the Second Revolt was crushed, that the Frisco 
Reds flourished again. And for two generations the Group flour 
ished. Then an agent of the Iron Heel managed to become a mem- 



284 THE IRON HEEL 

Colonel Ingram and Colonel Van Gilbert are two 
more familiar figures that I was later to encounter. 
Colonel Ingram rose high in the Oligarchy and became 
Minister to Germany. He was cordially detested by 
the proletariat of both countries. It was in Berlin 
that I met him, where, as an accredited international 
spy of the Iron Heel, I was received by him and afforded 
much assistance. Incidentally, I may state that in 
my dual role I managed a few important things for 
the Revolution. 

Colonel Van Gilbert became known as " Snarling" 
Van Gilbert. His important part was played in 
drafting the new code after the Chicago Commune. 
But before that, as trial judge, he had earned sentence 
of death by his fiendish malignancy. I was one of 
those that tried him and passed sentence upon him. 
Anna Roylston carried out the execution. 

Still another figure arises out of the old life Jack 
son s lawyer. Least of all would I have expected again 
to meet this man ; Joseph Hurd. It was a strange 
meeting. Late at night, two years after the Chicago 
Commune, Ernest and I arrived together at the Benton 
Harbor refuge. This was in Michigan, across the lake 
from Chicago. We arrived just at the conclusion of the 
trial of a spy. Sentence of death had been passed, and 

her, penetrated all its secrets, and brought about its total annihilation. 
This occurred in 2002 A.D. The members were executed one at a time, 
at intervals of three weeks, and their bodies exposed in the labor- 
ghetto of San Francisco. 



TRANSFORMATION 285 

he was being led away. Such was the scene as we came? 
upon it. The next moment the wretched man had 
wrenched free from his captors and flung himself at 
my feet, his arms clutching me about the knees in a 
vicelike grip as he prayed in a frenzy for mercy. As he 
turned his agonized face up to me, I recognized him 
as Joseph Hurd. Of all the terrible things I have wit 
nessed, never have I been so unnerved as by this frantic 
creature s pleading for life. He was mad for life. It was 
pitiable. He refused to let go of me, despite the hands 
of a dozen comrades. And when at last he was dragged 
shrieking away, I sank down fainting upon the floor. 
It is far easier to see brave men die than to hear a 
coward beg for life. 1 

1 The Benton Harbor refuge was a catacomb, the entrance of which 
was cunningly contrived by way of a well. It has been maintained in a 
fair state of preservation, and the curious visitor may to-day tread 
its labyrinths to the assembly hall, where, without doubt, occurred 
the scene described by Avis Everhard. Farther on are the cells where 
the prisoners were confined, and the death chamber where the execu 
tions took place. Beyond is the cemetery long, winding galleries 
hewn out of the solid rock, with recesses on either hand, wherein, tier 
above tier, lie the revolutionists just as they were laid away by their 
comrades long years agon*?. 



CHAPTER XX 

A LOST OLIGARCH 

BUT in remembering the old life I have run ahead 
of my story into the new life. The wholesale jail de 
livery did not occur until well along into 1915. Com 
plicated as it was, it was carried through without a 
hitch, and as a very creditable achievement it cheered 
us on in our work. From Cuba to California, out of 
scores of jails, military prisons, and fortresses, in a single 
night, we delivered fifty-one of our fifty-two Congress 
men, and in addition over three hundred other leaders. 
There was not a single instance of miscarriage. Not 
only did they escape, but every one of them won to the 
refuges as planned. The one comrade Congressman 
we did not get was Arthur Simpson, and he had already 
died in Cabanas after cruel tortures. 

The eighteen months that followed was perhaps the 
happiest period of my life with Ernest. During that 
time we were never apart. Later, when we went back 
into the world, we were separated much. Not more 
impatiently do I await the flame of to-morrow s re 
volt than did I that night await the coming of Ernest. 
I had not seen him for so long, and the thought of a 

possible hitch or error in our plans that would keep him 

286 



A LOST OLIGARCH 287 

still in his island prison almost drove me mad. The 
hours passed like ages. I was all alone. Biedenbach, 
and three young men who had been living in the refuge, 
were out and over the mountain, heavily armed and 
prepared for anything. The refuges all over the land 
were quite empty, I imagine, of comrades that night. 

Just as the sky paled with the first warning of dawn, 
I heard the signal from above and gave the answer. 
In the darkness I almost embraced Biedenbach, who 
came down first ; but the next moment I was in Ernest s 
arms. And in that moment, so complete had been my 
transformation, I discovered it was only by an effort 
of will that I could be the old Avis Everhard, with the 
old mannerisms and smiles, phrases and intonations of 
voice. It was by strong effort only that I was able to 
maintain my old identity; I could not allow myself 
to forget for an instant, so automatically imperative 
had become the new personality I had created. 

Once inside the little cabin, I saw Ernest s face in the 
light. With the exception of the prison pallor, there 
was no change in him at least, not much. He was 
my same lover-husband and hero. And yet there was 
a certain ascetic lengthening of the lines of his face. 
But he could well stand it, for it seemed to add a 
certain nobility of refinement to the riotous excess of 
life that had always marked his features. He might 
have been a trine graver than of yore, but the glint of 
laughter still was in his eyes. He was twenty pounds 



288 THE IRON HEER 

lighter, but in splendid physical condition. He had 
kept up exercise during the whole period of confine 
ment, and his muscles were like iron. In truth, he was 
in better condition than when he had entered prison. 
Hours passed before his head touched pillow and I had 
soothed him off to sleep. But there was no sleep for me. 
I was too happy, and the fatigue of jail-breaking and* 
riding horseback had not been mine. 

While Ernest slept, I changed my dress, arranged my 
hair differently, and came back to my new automatic 
self. Then, when Biedenbach and the other com 
rades awoke, with their aid I concocted a little con 
spiracy. All was ready, and we were in the cave-room 
that served for kitchen and dining room when Ernest 
opened the door and entered. At that moment Bie 
denbach addressed me as Mary, and I turned and an 
swered him. Then I glanced at Ernest with curious 
interest, such as any young comrade might betray on 
seeing for the first time so noted a hero of the Revolu 
tion. But Ernest s glance took me in and quested im 
patiently past and around the room. The next mo 
ment I was being introduced to him as Mary Holmes. 

To complete the deception, an extra plate was laid, 
and when we sat down to table one chair was not oc 
cupied. I could have cried out with joy as I noted 
Ernest s increasing uneasiness and impatience. Finally 
he could stand it no longer. 

"Where s my wife?" he demanded bluntly. 



A LOST OLIGARCH 289 

"She is still asleep," I answered. 

It was the crucial moment. But my voice was a 
strange voice, and in it he recognized nothing familiar. 
The meal went on. I talked a great deal, and enthu 
siastically, as a hero-worshipper might talk, and it was 
obvious that he was my hero. I rose to a climax of 
enthusiasm and worship, and, before he could guess my 
intention, threw my arms around his neck and kissed 
him on the lips. He held me from him at arm s length 
and stared about in annoyance and perplexity. The 
four men greeted him with roars of laughter, and ex 
planations were made. At first he was sceptical. He 
scrutinized me keenly and was half convinced, then 
shook his head and would not believe. It was not 
until I became the old Avis Everhard and whispered 
secrets in his ear that none knew but he and Avis 
Everhard, that he accepted me as his really, truly wife. 

It was later in the day that he took me in his arms, 
manifesting great embarrassment and claiming polyga 
mous emotions. 

"You are my Avis," he said, "and you are also some 
one else. You are two women, and therefore you are 
my harem. At any rate, we are safe now. If the 
United States becomes too hot for us, why, I have 
qualified for citizenship in Turkey." * 

Life became for me very happy in the refuge. It is 
true, we worked hard and for long hours ; but we worked 

1 At that time polygamy was still practised in Turkey, 
u 



290 THE IRON HEEL 

together. We had each other for eighteen precious 
months, and we were not lonely, for there was always 
a coming and going of leaders and comrades strange 
voices from the under-world of intrigue and revolution, 
bringing stranger tales of strife and war from all our 
battle-line. And there was much fun and delight. 
We were not mere gloomy conspirators. We toiled 
hard and suffered greatly, filled the gaps in our ranks 
and went on, and through all the labor and the play 
and interplay of life and death we found time to laugh 
and love. There were artists, scientists, scholars, 
musicians, and poets among us ; and in that hole in the 
ground culture was higher and finer than in the palaces 
or wonder-cities of the oligarchs. In truth, many of 
our comrades toiled at making beautiful those same 
palaces and wonder-cities. 1 

Nor were we confined to the refuge itself. Often at 
night we rode over the mountains for exercise, and w r e 
rode on Wickson s horses. If only he knew how many 
revolutionists his horses have carried ! We even went 
on picnics to isolated spots we knew, where we re 
mained all day, going before daylight and returning 
after dark. Also, we used Wickson s cream and butter ; 2 

1 This is not braggadocio on the part of Avis Everhard. The 
flower of the artistic and intellectual world were revolutionists. With 
the exception of a few of the musicians and singers, and of a few of the 
oligarchs, all the great creators of the period whose names have come 
down to us, were revolutionists. 

2 Even as late as that period, cream and butter were still crudely 
extracted from cow s milk. The laboratory preparation of foods had 
not yet begun. 



and Ernest was not above shooting Wickson s quail 
and rabbits, and, on occasion, his young bucks. 

Indeed, it was a safe refuge. I have said that it was 
discovered only once, and this brings me to the clearing 
up of the mystery of the disappearance of young Wick- 
son. Now that he is dead, I am free to speak. There 
was a nook on the bottom of the great hole where the 
sun shone for several hours and which was hidden from 
above. Here we had carried many loads of gravel from 
the creek-bed, so that it was dry and warm, a pleasant 
basking place ; and here, one afternoon, I was drowsing, 
half asleep, over a volume of Mendenhall. 1 I was so 
comfortable and secure that even his flaming lyrics 
failed to stir me. 

I was aroused by a clod of earth striking at my feet. 
Then, from above, I heard a sound of scrambling. The 
next moment a young man, with a final slide down the 
crumbling wall, alighted at my feet. It was Philip 
Wickson, though I did not know him at the time. He 
looked at me coolly and uttered a low whistle of surprise. 

"Well," he said ; and the next moment, cap in hand, 
he was saying, "I beg your pardon. I did not expect 
to find any one here." 

1 In all the extant literature and documents of that period, contin 
ual reference is made to the poems of Rudolph Mendenhall. By his 
comrades he was called " The Flame." He was undoubtedly a great 
genius; yet, beyond weird and haunting fragments of his verse, 
quoted in the writings of others, nothing of his has come down to us, 
He was executed by the Iron Heel in 1928 A.D. 



292 THE IRON HEEL 

I was not so cool. I was still a tyro so far as con 
cerned knowing how to behave in desperate circum 
stances. Later on, when I was an international spy, 
I should have been less clumsy, I am sure. As it was, 
I scrambled to my feet and cried out the danger call. 

"Why did you do that?" he asked, looking at me 
searchingly. 

It was evident that he had had no suspicion of our 
presence when making the descent. I recognized this 
with relief. 

"For what purpose do you think I did it?" I coun 
tered. I was indeed clumsy in those days. 

"I don t know," he answered, shaking his head. 
"Unless you ve got friends about. Anyway, you ve got 
some explanations to make. I don t like the look of it. 
You are trespassing. This is my father s land, and 

But at that moment, Biedenbach, ever polite and 
gentle, said from behind him in a low voice, " Hands up, 
my young sir." 

i Young Wickson put his hands up first, then turned 
to confront Biedenbach, who held a thirty-thirty auto 
matic rifle on him. Wickson was imperturbable. 

"Oh, ho," he said, "a nest of revolutionists and 
quite a hornet s nest it would seem. Well, you won t 
abide here long, I can tell you." 

"Maybe you ll abide here long enough to reconsider 
that statement," Biedenbach said quietly. "And in 
the meanwhile I must ask you to come inside with me." 



A LOST OLIGARCH 293 

"Inside?" The young man was genuinely aston 
ished. "Have you a catacomb here? I have heard: 
of such things." 

"Come on and see," Biedenbach answered with his- 
adorable accent. 

"But it is unlawful," was the protest. 

"Yes, by your law," the terrorist replied significantly. 
"But by our law, believe me, it is quite lawful. You 
must accustom yourself to the fact that you are in 
another world than the one of oppression and brutality 
in which you have lived." 

"There is room for argument there," Wickson mut 
tered. 

"Then stay with us and discuss it." 

The young fellow laughed and followed his captor 
into the house. He was led into the inner cave-room, 
and one of the young comrades left to guard him, while 
we discussed the situation in the kitchen. 

Biedenbach, with tears in his eyes, held that Wickson 
must die, and was quite relieved when we outvoted 
him and his horrible proposition. On the other hand, 
we could not dream of allowing the young oligarch to 
depart. 

"I ll tell you what to do," Ernest said. "We ll 
keep him and give him an education." 

"I bespeak the privilege, then, of enlightening him in 
jurisprudence," Biedenbach cried. 

And so a decision was laughingly reached. We 



294 THE IRON HEEL 

would keep Philip Wickson a prisoner and educate him 
in our ethics and sociology. But in the meantime there 
was work to be done. All trace of the young oligarch 
must be obliterated. There were the marks he had 
left when descending the crumbling wall of the hole. 
This task fell to Biedenbach, and, slung on a rope from 
above, he toiled cunningly for the rest of the day till 
no sign remained. Back up the canyon from the lip 
of the hole all marks were likewise removed. Then, 
at twilight, came John Carlson, who demanded Wick- 
son s shoes. 

The young man did not want to give up his shoes, 
and even offered to fight for them, till he felt the horse- 
ehoer s strength in Ernest s hands. Carlson afterward 
reported several blisters and much grievous loss of skin 
due to the smallness of the shoes, but he succeeded 
in doing gallant work with them. Back from the lip 
of the hole, where ended the young man s obliterated 
trail, Carlson put on the shoes and walked away to the 
left. He walked for miles, around knolls, over ridges 
and through canyons, and finally covered the trail in 
the running water of a creek-bed. Here he removed 
the shoes, and, still hiding trail for a distance, at last 
put on his own shoes. A week later Wickson got back 
his shoes. 

That night the hounds were out, and there was little 
sleep in the refuge. Next day, time and again, the 
baying hounds came down the canyon, plunged off 



A LOST OLIGARCH 295 

to the left on the trail Carlson had made for them, and 
were lost to ear in the farther canyons high up the 
mountain. And all the time our men waited in the 
refuge, weapons in hand automatic revolvers and 
rifles, to say nothing of half a dozen infernal machines 
of Biedenbach s manufacture. A more surprised party 
of rescuers could not be imagined, had they ventured 
down into our hiding-place. 

I have now given the true disappearance of Philip 
Wickson, one-time oligarch, and, later, comrade in the 
Revolution. For we converted him in the end. His 
mind was fresh and plastic, and by nature he was very 
ethical. Several months later we rode him, on one 
of his father s horses, over Sonoma Mountain to Peta- 
luma Creek and embarked him in a small fishing-launch. 
By easy stages we smuggled him along our underground 
railway to the Carmel refuge. 

There he remained eight months, at the end of which 
time, for two reasons, he was loath to leave us. One 
reason was that he had fallen in love with Anna Royl- 
ston, and the other was that he had become one of us. 
It was not until he became convinced of the hopeless 
ness of his love affair that he acceded to our wishes and 
went back to his father. Ostensibly an oligarch until 
his death, he was in reality one of the most valuable of 
our agents. Often and often has the Iron Heel been 
dumfounded by the miscarriage of its plans and opera 
tions against us. If it but knew the number of its 



296 THE IRON HEEL 

own members who are our agents, it would understand. 
Young Wickson never wavered in his loyalty to the 
Cause. In truth, his very death was incurred by his 
devotion to duty. In the great storm of 1927, while 
attending a meeting of our leaders, he contracted the 
pneumonia of which he died. 1 

1 The case of this young man was not unusual. Many young men 
of the Oligarchy, impelled by sense of right conduct, or their imagina 
tions captured by the glory of the Revolution, ethically or roman 
tically devoted their lives to it. In similar way, many sons of the 
Russian nobility played their parts in the earlier and protracted revo 
lution iii that country. 



CHAPTER XXI 

THE ROAEING ABYSMAL BEAST 

DURING the long period of our stay in the refuge, 
we were kept closely in touch with what was happening 
in the world without, and we were learning thoroughly 
the strength of the Oligarchy with which we were at 
war. Out of the flux of transition the new institutions 
were forming more definitely and taking on the appear 
ance and attributes of permanence. The oligarchs 
had succeeded in devising a governmental machine, as 
intricate as it was vast, that worked and this despite 
all our efforts to clog and hamper. 

This was a surprise to many of the revolutionists. 
* They had not conceived it possible. Nevertheless the 
work of the country went on. The men toiled in the 
mines and fields perforce they were no more than 
slaves. As for the vital industries, everything pros 
pered. The members of the great labor castes were 
contented and worked on merrily. For the first time 
in their lives they knew industrial peace. No more 
were they worried by slack times, strike and lockout, 
and the union label. They lived in more comfortable 

homes and in delightful cities of their own delight- 

297 



298 THE IRON HEEL 

ful compared with the slums and ghettos in which they 
had formerly dwelt. They had better food to eat, less 
hours of labor, more holidays, and a greater amount 
and variety of interests and pleasures. And for their 
less fortunate brothers and sisters, the unfavored labor 
ers, the driven people of the abyss, they cared nothing. 
An age of selfishness was dawning upon mankind. And 
yet this is not altogether true. The labor castes were 
honeycombed by our agents men whose eyes saw, 
beyond the belly-need, the radiant figure of liberty and 
brotherhood. 

Another great institution that had taken form and 
was working smoothly was the Mercenaries. This 
body of soldiers had been evolved out of the old regular 
army and was now a million strong, to say nothing of 
the colonial forces. The Mercenaries constituted a 
race apart. They dwelt in cities of their own which 
were practically self-governed, and they were granted 
many privileges. By them a large portion of the per 
plexing surplus was consumed. They were losing 
all touch and sympathy with the rest of the people, 
and, in fact, were developing their own class morality 
and consciousness. And yet we had thousands of our 
agents among them. 1 

1 The Mercenaries, in the last days of the Iron Heel, played an 
important r61e. They constituted the balance of power in the strug 
gles between the labor castes and the oligarchs, and now to one side 
and now to the other, threw their strength according to the play of 
intrigue and conspiracy. 



THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST 299 

The oligarchs themselves were going through a re 
markable and, it must be confessed, unexpected de 
velopment. As a class, they disciplined themselves. 
Every member had his work to do in the world, and 
this work he was compelled to do. There were no 
more idle-rich young men. Their strength was used 
to give united strength to the Oligarchy. They served 
as leaders of troops and as lieutenants and captains of 
industry. They found careers in applied science, and 
many of them became great engineers. They went into 
the multitudinous divisions of the government, took 
service in the colonial possessions, and by tens of 
thousands went into the various secret services. 
They were, I may say, apprenticed to education, to art, 
to the church, to science, to literature; and in those 
fields they served the important function of moulding 
the thought-processes of the nation in the direction of 
the perpetuity of the Oligarchy. 

They were taught, and later they in turn taught, 
that what they were doing was right. They assimilated 
the aristocratic idea from the moment they began, as 
children, to receive impressions of the world. The 
aristocratic idea was woven into the making of them 
until it became bone of them and flesh of them. They 
looked upon themselves as wild-animal trainers, rulers 
of beasts. From beneath their feet rose always the 
subterranean rumbles of revolt. Violent death ever 
stalked in their midst; bomb and knife and buUet 



300 THE IRON HEEL 

were looked upon as so many fangs of the roaring abys 
mal beast they must dominate if humanity were to 
persist. They were the saviours of humanity, and they 
regarded themselves as heroic and sacrificing laborers 
for the highest good. 

They, as a class, believed that they alone maintained 
civilization. It was their belief that if ever they 
weakened, the great beast would ingulf them and 
everything of beauty and wonder and joy and good in 
its cavernous and slime-dripping maw. Without them, 
anarchy would reign and humanity would drop back 
ward into the primitive night out of which it had 
so painfully emerged. The horrid picture of anarchy 
was held always before their child s eyes until they, in 
turn, obsessed by this cultivated fear, held the picture 
of anarchy before the eyes of the children that followed 
them. This was the beast to be stamped upon, and 
the highest duty of the aristocrat was to stamp upon 
it. In short, they alone, by their unremitting toil 
and sacrifice, stood between weak humanity and the 
all-devouring beast; and they believed it, firmly 
believed it. 

I cannot lay too great stress upon this high ethical 
righteousness of the whole oligarch class. This has 
been the strength of the Iron Heel, and too many of the 
comrades have been slow or loath to realize it. Many 
of them have ascribed the strength of the Iron Heel to 
its system of reward and punishment. This is a mis- 



THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST 301 

take. Heaven and hell may be the prime factors of 
zeal In the religion of a fanatic ; but for the great major 
ity of the religious, heaven and hell are incidental to 
right and wrong. Love of the right, desire for the 
right, unhappiness with anything less than the right 
in short, right conduct, is the prime factor of religion. 
And so with the Oligarchy. Prisons, banishment and 
degradation, honors and palaces and wonder-cities, are 
all incidental. The great driving force of the oligarchs 
is the belief that they are doing right. Never mind the 
exceptions, and never mind the oppression and injustice 
in which the Iron Heel was conceived. All is granted. 
The point is that the strength of the Oligarchy to-day 
lies in its satisfied conception of its own righteousness. 1 
For that matter, the strength of the Revolution, 
during these frightful twenty years, has resided in 
nothing else than the sense of righteousness. In no 
other way can be explained our sacrifices and martyr 
doms. For no other reason did Rudolph Mendenhall 
flame out his soul for the Cause and sing his wild 
swan-song that last night of life. For no other reason 

1 Out of the ethical incoherency and inconsistency of capitalism, 
the oligarchs emerged with a new ethics, coherent and definite, sharp 
and severe as steel, the most absurd and unscientific and at the same 
time the most potent ever possessed by any tyrant class. The oli 
garchs believed their ethics, in spite of the fact that biology and 
evolution gave them the lie; and, because of their faith, for three 
centuries they were able to hold back the mighty tide of human, 
progress a spectacle, profound, tremendous, puzzling to the meta 
physical moralist, and one that to the materialist is the cause of 
many doubts and reconsiderations. 



302 THE IRON HEEL 

did Hurlbert die under torture, refusing to the last to 
betray his comrades. For no other reason has Anna 
Roylston refused blessed motherhood. For no other 
reason has John Carlson been the faithful and unre 
warded custodian of the Glen Ellen Refuge. It does 
not matter, young or old, man or woman, high or low, * 
genius or clod, go where one will among the comrades 
of the Revolution, the motor-force will be found to be 
a great and abiding desire for the right. 

But I have run away from my narrative. Ernest 
and I well understood, before we left the refuge, how 
the strength of the Iron Heel was developing. The 
labor castes, the Mercenaries, and the great hordes of 
secret agents and police of various sorts were all 
pledged to the Oligarchy. In the main, and ignoring 
the loss of liberty, they were better off than they had 
been. On the other hand, the great helpless mass of 
the population, the people of the abyss, was sinking 
into a brutish apathy of content with misery. When 
ever strong proletarians asserted their strength in the 
midst of the mass, they were drawn away from the 
mass by the oligarchs and given better conditions by 
being made members of the labor castes or of the Mer 
cenaries. Thus discontent was lulled and the pro 
letariat robbed of its natural leaders. 

The condition of the people of the abyss was pitiable. 
Common school education, so far as they were con-; 
cerned, had ceased. They lived like beasts in great 



THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST 303 

squalid labor-ghettos, festering in misery and degrada 
tion. All their old liberties were gone. They were 
labor-slaves. Choice of work was denied them. Like 
wise was denied them the right to move from place 
to place, or the right to bear or possess arms. They 
were not land-serfs like the farmers. They were 
machine-serfs and labor-serfs. When unusual needs 
arose for them, such as the building of the great high 
ways and air-lines, of canals, tunnels, subways, and 
fortifications, levies were made on the labor-ghettos, 
and tens of thousands of serfs, willy-nilly, were trans 
ported to the scene of operations. Great armies of 
them are toiling now at the building of Ardis, housed in 
wretched barracks where family life cannot exist, and 
where decency is displaced by dull bestiality. In all 
truth, there in the labor-ghettos is the roaring abysmal 
beast the oligarchs fear so dreadfully but it is the 
beast of their own making. In it they will not let 
the ape and tiger die. 

And just now the word has gone forth that new 
levies are being imposed for the building of Asgard, the 
projected wonder-city that will far exceed Ardis when 
the latter is completed. 1 We of the Revolution will 

1 Ardis was completed in 1942 A.D., while Asgard was not com 
pleted until 1984 A.D. It was fifty-two years in the building, during 
which time a permanent army of half a million serfs was employed. 
At times these numbers swelled to over a million without any ac 
count being taken of the hundreds of thousands of the labor castes 
and the artists. 



304 THE IRON HEEL 

go on with that great work, but it will not be done by 
the miserable serfs. The walls and towers and shafts 
of that fair city will arise to the sound of singing, and 
into its beauty and wonder will be woven, not sighs 
and groans, but music and laughter. 

Ernest was madly impatient to be out in the world 
and doing, for our ill-fated First Revolt, that mis 
carried in the Chicago Commune, was ripening fast. 
Yet he possessed his soul with patience, and during the 
time of his torment, when Hadly, who had been brought 
for the purpose from Illinois, made him over into another 
man, 1 he revolved great plans in his head for the organi 
zation of the learned proletariat, and for the mainte 
nance of at least the rudiments of education amongst the 
people of the abyss all this, of course, in the event 
of the First Revolt being a failure. 

It was not until January, 1917, that we left the refuge. 

1 Among the Revolutionists were many surgeons, and in vivisec 
tion they attained marvellous proficiency. In Avis Everhard s words, 
they could literally make a man over. To them the elimination of * 
scars and disfigurements was a trivial detail. They changed the 
features with such microscopic care that no traces were left of their 
handiwork. The nose was a favorite organ to work upon. Skin- 
grafting and hair-transplanting were among their commonest de 
vices. The changes in expression they accomplished were wizard- 
like. Eyes and eyebrows, lips, mouths, and ears, were radically 
altered. By cunning operations on tongue, throat, larynx, and nasal 
cavities a man s whole enunciation and manner of speech could be 
changed. Desperate times give need for desperate remedies, and the 
surgeons of the Revolution rose to the need. Among other things, 
they could increase an adult s stature by as much as four or five inches 
and decrease it by one or two inches. What they did is to-day a lost 
art. We have no need for it. 



THE ROARING ABYSMAL BEAST 305 

All had been arranged. We took our place at once as 
agents-provocateurs in the scheme of the Iron Heel. I 
was supposed to be Ernest s sister. By oligarchs and 
comrades on the inside who were high in authority, 
place had been made for us, we were in possession of all 
necessary documents, and our pasts were accounted for. 
With help on the inside, this was not difficult, for in 
that shadow-world of secret service identity was 
nebulous. Like ghosts the agents came and went, 
obeying commands, fulfilling duties, following clews, 
making their reports often to officers they never saw 
or cooperating with other agents they had never seen 
before and would never see again. 



CHAPTER XXII 

THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 

As agents-provocateurs, not alone were we able to 
travel a great deal, but our very work threw us in 
contact with the proletariat and with our comrades, 
the revolutionists. Thus we were in both camps at 
the same time, ostensibly serving the Iron Heel and 
secretly working with all our might for the Cause. 
There were many of us in the various secret services 
of the Oligarchy, and despite the shakings-up and 
reorganizations the secret services have undergone, 
they have never been able to weed all of us out. 

Ernest had largely planned the First Revolt, and the 
date set had been somewhere early in the spring of 1918. 
In the fall of 1917 we were not ready; much remained 
to be done, and when the Revolt was precipitated, of 
course it was doomed to failure. The plot of necessity 
was frightfully intricate, and anything premature was 
sure to destroy it. This the Iron Heel foresaw and laid 
its schemes accordingly. 

We had planned to strike our first blow at the nervous 
system of the Oligarchy. The latter had remembered 

306 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 307 

the general strike, and had guarded against the defec 
tion of the telegraphers by installing wireless stations, 
in the control of the Mercenaries. We, in turn, had 
countered this move. When the signal was given, 
from every refuge, all over the land, and from the 
cities, and towns, and barracks, devoted comrades 
were to go forth and blow up the wireless stations. 
Thus at the first shock would the Iron Heel be brought 
to earth and lie practically dismembered. 

At the same moment, other comrades were to blow 
up the bridges and tunnels and disrupt the whole net 
work of railroads. Still further, other groups of com 
rades, at the signal, were to seize the officers of the 
Mercenaries and the police, as well as all Oligarchs of 
unusual ability or who held executive positions. Thus 
would the leaders of the enemy be removed from the 
field of the local battles that would inevitably be 
fought all over the land. 

Many things were to occur simultaneously when the 
signal went forth. The Canadian and Mexican pa 
triots, who were far stronger than the Iron Heel dreamed, 
were to duplicate our tactics. Then there were com 
rades (these were the women, for the men would be 
busy elsewhere) who were to post the proclamations 
from our secret presses. Those of us in the higher 
employ of the Iron Heel were to proceed immediately 
to make confusion and anarchy in all our departments. 
Inside the Mercenaries were thousands of our comrades. 



308 THE IRON HEEL 

Their work was to blow up the magazines and to de 
stroy the delicate mechanism of all the war machinery. 
In the cities of the Mercenaries and of the labor castes 
similar programmes of disruption were to be carried 
out. 

In short, a sudden, colossal, stunning blow was to 
be struck. Before the paralyzed Oligarchy could 
recover itself, its end would have come. It would 
have meant terrible times and great loss of life, but no 
revolutionist hesitates at such things. Why, we even 
depended much, in our plan, on the unorganized people 
of the abyss. They were to be loosed on the palaces 
and cities of the masters. Never mind the destruction 
of life and property. Let the abysmal brute roar and 
the police and Mercenaries slay. The abysmal brute 
would roar anyway, and the police and Mercenaries 
would slay anyway. It would merely mean that 
various dangers to us were harmlessly destroying one 
another. In the meantime we would be doing our 
own work, largely unhampered, and gaining control 
of all the machinery of society. 

Such was our plan, every detail of which had to be 
worked out in secret, and, as the day drew near, com 
municated to more and more comrades. This was the 
danger point, the stretching of the conspiracy. But 
that danger-point was never reached. Through its 
spy-system the Iron Heel got wind of the Revolt and 
prepared to teach us another of its bloody lessons. 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 309 

Chicago was the devoted city selected for the instruc 
tion, and well were we instructed. 

Chicago * was the ripest of all Chicago which of 
old time was the city of blood and which was to earn 
anew its name. There the revolutionary spirit was 
strong. Too many bitter strikes had been curbed there 
in the days of capitalism for the workers to forget and 
forgive. Even the labor castes of the city were alive 
with revolt. Too many heads had been broken in the 
carry strikes. Despite their changed and favorable 
conditions, their hatred for the master class had not 
died. This spirit had infected the Mercenaries, of 
which three regiments in particular were ready to come 
over to us en masse. 

Chicago had always been the storm-centre of the 
conflict between labor and capital, a city of street- 
battles and violent death, with a class-conscious 
capitalist organization and a class-conscious work 
man organization, where, in the old days, the very 
school-teachers were formed into labor unions and 
affiliated with the hod-carriers and brick-layers in the 

1 Chicago was the industrial inferno of the nineteenth century A.D. 
A curious anecdote has come down to us of John Burns, a great English 
labor leader and one time member of the British Cabinet. In Chicago, 
while on a visit to the United States, he was asked by a newspaper 
reporter for his opinion of that city. "Chicago," he answered, "is 
a pocket edition of hell." Some time later, as he was going aboard 
his steamer to sail to England, he was approached by another re 
porter, who wanted to know if he had changed his opinion of Chicago, 
"Yes, I have," was his reply. "My present opinion is that hell is a 
pocket edition of Chicago." 



310 THE IRON HEEL 

American Federation of Labor. And Chicago became 
the storm-centre of the premature First Revolt. 

The trouble was precipitated by the Iron Heel. It 
was cleverly done. The whole population, including 
the favored labor castes, was given a course of out 
rageous treatment. Promises and agreements were 
broken, and most drastic punishments visited upon 
even petty offenders. The people of the abyss were 
tormented out of their apathy. In fact, the Iron Heel 
was preparing to make the abysmal beast roar. And 
hand in hand with this, in all precautionary measures 
in Chicago, the Iron Heel was inconceivably careless. 
Discipline was relaxed among the Mercenaries that 
remained, while many regiments had been withdrawn 
and sent to various parts of the country. 

It did not take long to carry out this programme 
only several weeks. We of the Revolution caught 
vague rumors of the state of affairs, but had nothing 
definite enough for an understanding. In fact, we 
thought it was a spontaneous spirit of revolt that 
would require careful curbing on our part, and never 
dreamed that it was deliberately manufactured and 
it had been manufactured so secretly, from the very 
innermost circle of the Iron Heel, that we had got no 
inkling. The counter-plot was an able achievement, 
and ably carried out. 

I was in New York when I received the order to 
proceed immediately to Chicago. The man who gave 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 311 

me the order was one of the oligarchs, I could tell that 
by his speech, though I did not know his name nor see 
his face. His instructions were too clear for me to 
make a mistake. Plainly I read between the lines that 
our plot had been discovered, that we had been counter 
mined. The explosion was ready for the flash of pow 
der, and countless agents of the Iron Heel, including 
me, either on the ground or being sent there, were to 
supply that flash. I flatter myself that I maintained 
my composure under the keen eye of the oligarch, but 
my heart was beating madly. I could almost have 
shrieked and flown at his throat with my naked hands 
before his final, cold-blooded instructions were given. 

Once out of his presence, I calculated the time. I 
had just the moments to spare, if I were lucky, to get 
in touch with some local leader before catching my train. 
Guarding against being trailed, I made a rush of it for 
the Emergency Hospital. Luck was with me, and I 
gained access at once to comrade Galvin, the surgeon- 
in-chief. I started to gasp out my information, but 
he stopped me. 

"I already know," he said quietly, though his Irish 
eyes were flashing. "I knew what you had come for. 
I got the word fifteen minutes ago, and I have already 
passed it along. Everything shall be done here to 
keep the comrades quiet. Chicago is to be sacrificed, 
but it shall be Chicago alone." 

"Have you tried to get word to Chicago?" I asked. 



312 THE IRON HEEL 

He shook his head. "No telegraphic communica 
tion. Chicago is shut off. It s going to be hell there." 
He paused a moment, and I saw his white hands 
clinch. Then he burst out : 

"By God ! I wish I were going to be there !" 
"There is yet a chance to stop it," I said, "if nothing 
happens to the train and I can get there in time. Or 
if some of the other secret-service comrades who have 
learned the truth can get there in time." 

"You on the inside were caught napping this time," 
he said. 

I nodded my head humbly. 

"It was very secret," I answered. "Only the inner 
chiefs could have known up to to-day. We haven t 
yet penetrated that far, so we couldn t escape being 
kept in the dark. If only Ernest were here. Maybe 
he is in Chicago now, and all is well." 

Dr. Galvin shook his head. "The last news I heard 
of him was that he had been sent to Boston or New 
Haven. This secret service for the enemy must hamper 
him a lot, but it s better than lying in a refuge." 
I started to go, and Galvin wrung my hand. 
"Keep a stout heart," were his parting words. 
"What if the First Revolt is lost? There will be a 
second, and we will be wiser then. Good-by and 
good luck. I don t know whether I ll ever see you 
again. It s going to be hell there, but I d give ten 
years of my life for your chance to be in it." 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 313 

The Twentieth Century 1 left New York at six in the 
evening, and was supposed to arrive at Chicago at 
seven next morning. But it lost time that night. 
We were running behind another train. Among the 
travellers in my Pullman was comrade Hartman, like 
myself in the secret service of the Iron Heel. He it 
was who told me of the train that immediately preceded 
us. It was an exact duplicate of our train, though it 
contained no passengers. The idea was that the empty 
train should receive the disaster were an attempt made 
to blow up the Twentieth Century. For that matter 
there were very few people on the train only a baker s 
dozen in our car. 

"There must be some big men on board," Hartman 
concluded. "I noticed a private car on the rear." 

Night had fallen when we made our first change of 
engine, and I walked down the platform for a breath 
of fresh air and to see what I could see. Through the 
windows of the private car I caught a glimpse of three 
men whom I recognized. Hartman was right. One 
of the men was General Altendorff ; and the other two 
were Mason and Vanderbold, the brains of the inner 
circle of the Oligarchy s secret service. 

It was a quiet moonlight night, but I tossed rest^ 
lessly and could not sleep. At five in the morning I 
dressed and abandoned my bed. 

1 This was reputed to be the fastest train in the world then. It 
\vas quite a famous train. 



314 THE IRON HEEIL 

I asked the maid in the dressing-room how late the 
train was, and she told me two hours. She was a 
mulatto woman, and I noticed that her face was hag 
gard, with great circles under the eyes, while the eyes 
themselves were wide with some haunting fear. 

"What is the matter?" Tasked. 

" Nothing, miss; I didn t sleep well, I guess," was 
her reply. 

I looked at her closely, and tried her with one of our 
signals. She responded, and I made sure of her. 

"Something terrible is going to happen in Chicago," 
she said. "There s that fake 1 train in front of us. 
That and the troop-trains have made us late." 

"Troop-trains?" I queried. 

She nodded her head. "The line is thick with them. 
We ve been passing them all night. And they re all 
heading for Chicago. And bringing them over the 
air-line that means business. 

"I ve a lover in Chicago," she added apologetically. 
"He s one of us, and he s in the Mercenaries, and I m 
afraid for him." 

Poor girl. Her lover was in one of the three disloyal 
regiments. 

Hartman and I had breakfast together in the dining 
car, and I forced myself to eat. The sky had clouded, 
and the train rushed on like a sullen thunderbolt through 
the gray pall of advancing day. The very negroes that 

1 False. 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 315 

waited on us knew that something terrible was impend 
ing. Oppression sat heavily upon them ; the lightness 
of their natures had ebbed out of them; they were 
slack and absent-minded in their service, and they 
whispered gloomily to one another in the far end of 
the car next to the kitchen. Hartman was hopeless 
over the situation. 

"What can we do?" he demanded for the twentieth 
time, with a helpless shrug of the shoulders. 

He pointed out of the window. "See, all is ready. 
You can depend upon it that they re holding them like 
this, thirty or forty miles outside the city, on every 
road." 

He had reference to troop-trains on the side-track. 
The soldiers were cooking their breakfasts over fires 
built on the ground beside the track, and they looked 
up curiously at us as we thundered past without 
slackening our terrific speed. 

All was quiet as we entered Chicago. It was evident 
nothing had happened yet. In the suburbs the morn 
ing papers came on board the train. There was noth 
ing in them, and yet there was much in them for those 
skilled in reading between the lines that it was intended 
the ordinary reader should read into the text. The 
fine hand of the Iron Heel was apparent in every col 
umn. Glimmerings of weakness in the armor of the 
Oligarchy were given. Of course, there was nothing 
definite. It was intended that the reader should feel 



316 THE IRON HEEL 

his way to these glimmerings. It was cleverly done. 
As fiction, those morning papers of October 27th were 
masterpieces. 

The local news was missing. This in itself was a 
master-stroke. It shrouded Chicago in mastery, and 
it suggested to the average Chicago reader that the 
Oligarchy did not dare give the local news. Hints 
that were untrue, of course, were given of insubordina 
tion all over the land, crudely disguised with com 
placent references to punitive measures to be taken. 
There were reports of numerous wireless stations that 
had been blown up, with heavy rewards offered for 
the detection of the perpetrators. Of course no wire 
less stations had been blown up. Many similar out 
rages, that dovetailed with the plot of the revolution 
ists, were given. The impression to be made on the 
minds of the Chicago comrades was that the general 
Revolt was beginning, albeit with a confusing mis 
carriage in many details. It was impossible for one 
uninformed to escape the vague yet certain feeling 
that all the land was ripe for the revolt that had already 
begun to break out. 

It was reported that the defection of the Mercenaries 
in California had become so serious that half a dozen 
regiments had been disbanded and broken, and that 
their members with their families had been driven from 
their own city and on into the labor-ghettos. And the 
California Mercenaries were in reality the most faithful 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 317 

of all to their salt ! But how was Chicago, shut off 
from the rest of the world, to know ? Then there was a 
ragged telegram describing an outbreak of the populace 
in New York City, in which the labor castes were join 
ing, concluding with the statement (intended to be 
accepted as a bluff 1 ) that the troops had the situation in 
hand. 

And as the oligarchs had done with the morning 
papers, so had they done in a thousand other ways. 
These we learned afterward, as, for example, the secret 
messages of the oligarchs, sent with the express purpose 
of leaking to the ears of the revolutionists, that had 
come over the wires, now and again, during the first 
part of the night. 

"I guess the Iron Heel won t need our services," 
Hartman remarked, putting down the paper he had 
been reading, when the train pulled into the central 
depot. "They wasted their time sending us here. 
Their plans have evidently prospered better than 
they expected. Hell will break loose any second 



now." 



He turned and looked down the train as we alighted. 

"I thought so," he muttered. "They dropped that 
private car when the papers came aboard." 

Hartman was hopelessly depressed. I tried to 
cheer him up, but he ignored my effort and suddenly 
began talking very hurriedly, in a low voice, as we 

1 A lie. 



318 THE IRON HEEi 

passed through the station. At first I could not under 
stand. 

"I have not been sure," he was saying, "and I have 
told no one. I have been working on it for weeks, 
and I cannot make sure. Watch out for Knowlton. I 
suspect him. He knows the secrets of a score of our 
refuges. He carries the lives of hundreds of us in his 
hands, and I think he is a traitor. It s more a feeling 
on my part than anything else. But I thought I 
marked a change in him a short while back. There is 
the danger that he has sold us out, or is going to sell us 
out. I am almost sure of it. I wouldn t whisper my 
suspicions to a soul, but, somehow, I don t think I ll 
leave Chicago alive. Keep your eye on Knowlton. 
Trap him. Find out. I don t know anything more. 
It is only an intuition, and so far I have failed to find 
the slightest clew." We were just stepping out upon 
the sidewalk. " Remember, "Hartman concluded ear 
nestly. "Keep your eyes upon Knowlton." 

And Hartman was right. Before a month went by 
Knowlton paid for his treason with his life. He was 
formally executed by the comrades in Milwaukee. 

All was quiet on the streets too quiet. Chicago 
lay dead. There was no roar and rumble of traffic. 
There were not even cabs on the streets. The surface 
cars and the elevated were not running. Only occa 
sionally, on the sidewalks, were there stray pedestrians, 
and these pedestrians did not loiter. They went their 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 319 

ways with great haste and definiteness, withal there 
was a curious indecision in their movements, as though 
they expected the buildings to topple over on them or 
the sidewalks to sink under their feet or fly up in the 
air. A few gamins, however, were around, in their 
eyes a suppressed eagerness in anticipation of wonder 
ful and exciting things to happen. 

From somewhere, far to the south, the dull sound of 
an explosion came to our ears. That was all. Then 
quiet again, though the gamins had startled and lis 
tened, like young deer, at the sound. The doorways 
to all the buildings were closed; the shutters to the 
shops were up. But there were many police and 
watchmen in evidence, and now and again automobile 
patrols of the Mercenaries slipped swiftly past. 

Hartman and I agreed that it was useless to report 
ourselves to the local chiefs of the secret service. Our 
failure so to report would be excused, we knew, in the 
light of subsequent events. So we headed for the great 
labor-ghetto on the South Side in the hope of getting 
in contact with some of the comrades. Too late ! Wei 
knew it. But we could not stand still and do nothing 
in those ghastly, silent streets. Where was Ernest? 
I was wondering. What was happening in the cities 
of the labor castes and Mercenaries ? In the fortresses ? 

As if in answer, a great screaming roar went up, dim 
with distance, punctuated with detonation after de 
tonation. 



320 THE IRON HEEL 

"It s the fortresses," Hartman said. "God pity those 
three regiments!" 

At a crossing we noticed, in the direction of the 
stockyards, a gigantic pillar of smoke. At the next 
crossing several similar smoke pillars were rising sky 
ward in the direction of the West Side. Over the city 
of the Mercenaries we saw a great captive war-balloon 
that burst even as we looked at it, and fell in flaming 
wreckage toward the earth. There was no clew to that 
tragedy of the air. We could not determine whether 
the balloon had been manned by comrades or enemies. 
A vague sound came to our ears, like the bubbling of a 
gigantic caldron a long way off, and Hartman said it 
was machine-guns and automatic rifles. 

And still we walked in immediate quietude. Noth 
ing was happening where we were. The police and the 
automobile patrols went by, and once half a dozen fire- 
engines, returning evidently from some conflagration. 
A question was called to the firemen by an officer in an 
automobile, and we heard one shout in reply: "No i 
water! They ve blown up the mains!" 

"We ve smashed the water supply," Hartman cried 
excitedly to me. "If we can do all this in a premature, 
isolated, abortive attempt, what can t we do in a con 
certed, ripened effort all over the land?" 

The automobile containing the officer who had asked 
the question darted on. Suddenly there was a deafen 
ing roar. The machine, with its human freight, lifted 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 321 

in an upburst of smoke, and sank down a mass of 
wreckage and death. 

Hartman was jubilant. "Well done! well done!" 
he was repeating, over and over, in a whisper. "The 
proletariat gets its lesson to-day, but it gives one, too." 

Police were running for the spot. Also, another 
patrol machine had halted. As for myself, I was in a 
daze. The suddenness of it was stunning. How had 
it happened? I knew not how, and yet I had been 
looking directly at it. So dazed was I for the moment 
that I was scarcely aware of the fact that we were being 
held up by the police. I abruptly saw that a policeman 
was in the act of shooting Hartman. But Hartman 
was cool and was giving the proper passwords. I saw 
the levelled revolver hesitate, then sink down, and heard 
the disgusted grunt of the policeman. He was very 
angry, and was cursing the whole secret service. It was 
always in the way, he was averring, while Hartman was 
talking back to him and with fitting secret-service pride 
explaining to him the clumsiness of the police. 

The next moment I knew how it had happened. 
There was quite a group about the wreck, and two men 
were just lifting up the wounded officer to carry him 
to the other machine. A panic seized all of them, and 
they scattered in every direction, running in blind 
terror, the wounded officer, roughly dropped, being 
left behind. The cursing policeman alongside of me 
also ran, and Hartman and I ran, too, we knew not 



322 THE IRON HEEL 

why, obsessed with the same blind terror to get away 
from, that particular spot. 

Nothing really happened then, but everything was 
explained. The flying men were sheepishly coming 
back, but all the while their eyes were raised appre 
hensively to the many-windowed, lofty buildings that 
towered like the sheer walls of a canyon on each side of 
the street. From one of those countless windows the 
bomb had been thrown, but which window? There 
had been no second bomb, only a fear of one. 

Thereafter we looked with speculative comprehension 
at the windows. Any of them contained possible death. 
Each building was a possible ambuscade. This was 
warfare in that modern jungle, a great city. Every 
street was a canyon, every building a mountain. We 
had not changed much from primitive man, despite 
the war automobiles that were sliding by. 

Turning a corner, we came upon a woman. She was 
lying on the pavement, in a pool of blood. Hartman 
bent over and examined her. As for myself, I turned 
deathly sick. I was to see many dead that day, but 
the total carnage was not to affect me as did this first 
forlorn body lying there at my feet abandoned on the 
pavement. "Shot in the breast," was Hartman s 
report. Clasped in the hollow of her arm, as a child 
might be clasped, was a bundle of printed matter. 
Even in death she seemed loath to part with that which 
had caused her death; for when Hartman had sue- 



THE CHICAGO COMMUNE 323 

ceeded in withdrawing the bundle, we found that it 
consisted of large printed sheets, the proclamations of 
the revolutionists. 

"A comrade," I said. 

But Hartman only cursed the Iron Heel, and we 
passed on. Often we were halted by the police and ; 
patrols, but our passwords enabled us to proceed. No 
more bombs fell from the windows, the last pedestrians 
seemed to have vanished from the streets, and our 
immediate quietude grew more profound ; though the 
gigantic caldron continued to bubble in the distance,, 
dull roars of explosions came to us from all directions, 
and the smoke-pillars were towering more ominously 
in the heavens. 



CHAPTER XXIII 

Is 

THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 

, SUDDENLY a change came over the face of things. 
A tingle of excitement ran along the air. Automobiles 
fled past, two, three, a dozen, and from them warnings 
were shouted to us. One of the machines swerved 
wildly at high speed half a block down, and the next 
moment, already left well behind it, the pavement 
was torn into a great hole by a bursting bomb. We 
saw the police disappearing down the cross-streets on 
the run, and knew that something terrible was coming. 
We could hear the rising roar of it. 

"Our brave comrades are coming," Hartman said. 

We could see the front of their column filling the 
street from gutter to gutter, as the last war-automobile 
fled past. The machine stopped for a moment just 
abreast of us. A soldier leaped from it, carrying some 
thing carefully in his hands. This, with the same 
care, he deposited in the gutter. Then he leaped back 
to his seat and the machine dashed on, took the turn 
at the corner, and was gone from sight. Hartman ran 
to the gutter and stooped over the object. 

"Keep back/ he warned me. 

324 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 325 

I could see he was working rapidly with his hands. 
When he returned to me the sweat was heavy on his 
forehead. 

"I disconnected it," he said, "and just in the nick 
of time. The soldier was clumsy. He intended it for 
our comrades, but he didn t give it enough time. It 
would have exploded prematurely. Now it won t 
explode at all." 

Everything was happening rapidly now. Across 
the street and half a block down, high up in a building, 
I could see heads peering out. I had just pointed them 
out to Hartman, when a sheet of flame and smoke ran 
along that portion of the face of the building where the 
heads had appeared, and the air was shaken by the 
explosion. In places the stone facing of the building 
was torn away, exposing the iron construction beneath. 
The next moment similar sheets of flame and smoke 
smote the front of the building across the street oppo 
site it. Between the explosions we could hear the 
rattle of the automatic pistols and rifles. For several 
minutes this mid-air battle continued, then died out. 
It was patent that our comrades were in one building, 
that Mercenaries were in the other, and that they were 
fighting across the street. But we could not tell which 
was which which building contained our comrades 
and which the Mercenaries. 

By this time the column on the street was almost on 
us. As the front of it passed under the warring build- 



326 THE IRON HEEL 

ings, both went into action again one building 
dropping bombs into the street, being attacked from 
across the street, and in return replying to that attack. 
Thus we learned which building was held by our com 
rades, and they did good work, saving those in the 
street from the bombs of the enemy. 

Hartman gripped my arm and dragged me into a 
wide entrance. 

"They re not our comrades," he shouted in my ear. 

The inner doors to the entrance were locked and 
bolted. We could not escape. The next moment the 
front of the column went by. It was not a column, 
but a mob, an awful river that rilled the street, the 
people of the abyss, mad with drink and wrong, up at 
last and roaring for the blood of their masters. I had 
seen the people of the abyss before, gone through its 
ghettos, and thought I knew it; but I found that I 
was now looking on it for the first time. Dumb apathy 
had vanished. It was now dynamic a fascinating 
spectacle of dread. It surged past my vision in con 
crete waves of wrath, snarling and growling, carnivo 
rous, drunk with whiskey from pillaged warehouses, 
drunk with hatred, drunk with lust for blood men, 
women, and children, in rags and tatters, dim ferocious 
intelligences with all the godlike blotted from their 
features and all the fiendlike stamped in, apes and 
tigers, anaemic consumptives and great hairy beasts 
of burden, wan faces from which vampire society had 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 327 

sucked the juice of life, bloated forms swollen with 
physical grossness and corruption, withered hags and 
death s-heads bearded like patriarchs, festering youth 
and festering age, faces of fiends, crooked, twisted, 
misshapen monsters blasted with the ravages of disease 
and all the horrors of chronic innutrition the refuse 
and the scum of life, a raging, screaming, screeching, 
demoniacal horde. 

And why not ? The people of the abyss had nothing 
to lose but the misery and pain of living. And to gain ? 
nothing, save one final, awful glut of vengeance. 
And as I looked the thought came to me that in that 
rushing stream of human lava were men, comrades and 
heroes, whose mission had been to rouse the abysmal 
beast and to keep the enemy occupied in coping with it. 

And now a strange thing happened to me. A trans^- 
formation came over me. The fear of death, for myself 
and for others, left me. I was strangely exalted, an 
other being in another life. Nothing mattered. The 
Cause for this one time was lost, but the Cause would 
be here to-morrow, the same Cause, ever fresh and ever 
burning. And thereafter, in the orgy of horror that 
raged through the succeeding hours, I was able to take 
a calm interest. Death meant nothing, life meant 
nothing. I was an interested spectator of events, and, 
sometimes swept on by the rush, was myself a curious 
participant. For my mind had leaped to a star-cool 
altitude and grasped a passionless transvaluation of 



328 THE IRON HEEL 

values. Had it not done this, I know that I should 
have died. 

Half a mile of the mob had swept by when we were 
discovered. A woman in fantastic rags, with cheeks 
cavernously hollow and with narrow black eyes like 
burning gimlets, caught a glimpse of Hartman and 
me. She let out a shrill shriek and bore in upon us. 
A section of the mob tore itself loose and surged in 
after her. I can see her now, as I write these lines, a 
leap in advance, her gray hair flying in thin tangled 
strings, the blood dripping down her forehead from 
some wound in the scalp, in her right hand a hatchet, 
her left hand, lean and wrinkled, a yellow talon, gripping 
the air convulsively. Hartman sprang in front of me. 
This was no time for explanations. We were well 
dressed, and that was enough. His fist shot out, strik 
ing the woman between her burning eyes. The impact 
of the blow drove her backward, but she struck the 
wall of her on-coming fellows and bounced forward 
again, dazed and helpless, the brandished hatchet 
falling feebly on Hartman s shoulder. 

The next moment I knew not what was happening. 
I was overborne by the crowd. The confined space was 
filled with shrieks and yells and curses. Blows were 
falling on me. Hands were ripping and tearing at my 
flesh and garments. I felt that I was being torn to 
pieces. I was being borne down, suffocated. Some 
strong hand gripped my shoulder in the thick of the 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 329 

press and was dragging fiercely at me. Between pain 
and pressure I fainted. Hartman never came out of 
that entrance. He had shielded me and received the 
first brunt of the attack. This had saved me, for the 
jam had quickly become too dense for anything more 
than the mad gripping and tearing of hands. 

I came to in the midst of wild movement. All about 
me was the same movement. I had been caught up in 
a monstrous flood that was sweeping me I knew not 
whither. Fresh air was on my cheek and biting sweetly 
in my lungs. Faint and dizzy, I was vaguely aware of 
a strong arm around my body under the arms, and half- 
lifting me and dragging me along. Feebly my own 
limbs were helping me. In front of me I could see the 
moving back of a man s coat. It had been slit from 
top to bot om along the centre seam, and it pulsed 
rhythmically, the slit opening and closing regularly 
with every leap of the wearer. This phenomenon 
fascinated me for a time, while my senses were coming 
back to me. Next I became aware of stinging cheeks 
and nose, and could feel blood dripping on my face. My 
hat was gone. My hair was down and flying, and from 
the stinging of the scalp I managed to recollect a hand 
in the press of the entrance that had torn at my hair. 
My chest and arms were bruised and aching in a score 
of places. 

My brain grew clearer, and I turned as I ran and 
looked at the man who was holding me up. He it was 



330 THE IRON HEEL 

who had dragged me out and saved me. He noticed 
my movement. 

"It s all right !" he shouted hoarsely. "I knew you 
on the instant." 

I failed to recognize him, but before I could speak 
I trod upon something that was alive and that squirmed 
under my foot. I was swept on by those behind and 
could not look down and see, and yet I knew that it was 
a woman who had fallen and who was being trampled 
into the pavement by thousands of successive feet. 

"It s all right," he repeated. "I m Garthwaite." 

He was bearded and gaunt and dirty, but I succeeded 
in remembering him as the stalwart youth that had 
spent several months in our Glen Ellen refuge three 
years before. He passed me the signals of the Iron 
Heel s secret service, in token that he, too, was in its 
employ. 

"I ll get you out of this as soon as I can get a chance," 
he assured me. "But watch your footing. On your 
life don t stumble and go down." 

All things happened abruptly on that day, and with 
an abruptness that was sickening the mob checked 
itself. I came in violent collision with a large woman 
in front of me (the man with the split coat had van 
ished), while those behind collided against me. A 
devilish pandemonium reigned, shrieks, curses, and 
cries of death, while above all rose the churning rattle 
of machine-guns and the put-a-put, put-a-put of rifles. 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 331 

At first I could make out nothing. People were falling 
about me right and left. The woman in front doubled 
up and went down, her hands on her abdomen in a 
frenzied clutch. A man was quivering against my legs 
in a death-struggle. 

It came to me that we were at the head of the col 
umn. Half a mile of it had disappeared where or 
how I never learned. To this day I do not know what 

became of that half-mile of humanity whether it was 

^ 
blotted out by some frightful bolt of war, whether it 

was scattered and destroyed piecemeal, or whether it 
escaped. But there we were, at the head of the column 
instead of in its middle, and we were being swept out of 
life by a torrent of shrieking lead. 

As soon as death had thinned the jam, Garthwaite, 
still grasping my arm, led a rush of survivors into the 
wide entrance of an office building. Here, at the rear, 
against the doors, we were pressed by a panting, gasping 
mass of creatures. For some time we remained in this 
position without a change in the situation. 

"I did it beautifully," Garthwaite was lamenting to 
me. "Ran you right into a trap. We had a gambler s 
chance in the street, but in here there is no chance at all. 
It s all over but the shouting. Vive la Revolution !" 

Then, what he expected, began. The Mercenaries 
were killing without quarter. At first, the surge back 
upon us was crushing, but as the killing continued the 
pressure was eased. The dead and dying went down. 



332 THE IRON HEEL 

and made room. Garthwaite put his mouth to my ear 
and shouted, but in the frightful din I could not catch 
what he said. He did not wait. He seized me and 
threw me down. Next he dragged a dying woman over 
on top of me, and, with much squeezing and shoving, 
crawled in beside me and partly over me. A mound of 
dead and dying began to pile up over us, and over this 
mound, pawing and moaning, crept those that still 
survived. But these, too, soon ceased, and a semi- 
silence settled down, broken by groans and sobs and 
sounds of strangulation. 

I should have been crushed had it not been for Garth 
waite. As it was, it seemed inconceivable that I could 
bear the weight I did and live. And yet, outside of 
pain, the only feeling I possessed was one of curiosity. 
How was it going to end ? What would death be like ? 
Thus did I receive my red baptism in that Chicago 
shambles. Prior to that, death to me had been a 
theory; but ever afterward death has been a simple 
fact that does not matter, it is so easy. 

But the Mercenaries were not content with what they 
had done. They invaded the entrance, killing the 
wounded and searching out the unhurt that, like our 
selves, were playing dead. I remember one man they 
dragged out of a heap, who pleaded abjectly until a 
revolver shot cut him short. Then there was a woman 
who charged from a heap, snarling and shooting. She 
fired six shots before they got her, though what dam- 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 333 

age she did we could not know. We could follow these 
tragedies only by the sound. Every little while flur 
ries like this occurred, each flurry culminating in the 
revolver shot that put an end to it. In the intervals we 
could hear the soldiers talking and swearing as they 
rummaged among the carcasses, urged on by their 
officers to hurry up. 

At last they went to work on our heap, and we could 
feel the pressure diminish as they dragged away the 
dead and wounded. Garthwaite began uttering aloud 
the signals. At first he was not heard. Then he raised 
his voice. 

"Listen to that," we heard a soldier say. And next 
the sharp voice of an officer. "Hold on there ! Care 
ful as you go !" 

Oh, that first breath of air as we were dragged out ! 
Garthwaite did the talking at first, but I was compelled 
to undergo a brief examination to prove service with the 
Iron Heel. 

"Agents-provocateurs all right," was the officer s 
conclusion. He was a beardless young fellow, a cadet, 
evidently, of some great oligarch family. 

"It s a hell of a job," Garthwaite grumbled. "I m 
going to try and resign and get into the army. You 
fellows have a snap." 

"You ve earned it," was the young officer s answer. 
"I ve got some pull, and I ll see if it can be managed. 
I can tell them how I found you." 



334 THE IRON HEEL 

He took Garthwaite s name and number, then turned 
to me. 
"And you?" 

"Oh, I m going to be married," I answered lightly, 
"and then I ll be out of it all." 

And so we talked, while the killing of the wounded , 
went on. It is all a dream, now, as I look back on it ; 
but at the time it was the most natural thing in the 
world. Garthwaite and the young officer fell into an 
animated conversation over the difference between so- 
called modern warfare and the present street-fighting 
and sky-scraper fighting that was taking place all over 
the city. I followed them intently, fixing up my hair 
at the same time and pinning together my torn skirts. 
And all the time the killing of the wounded went on. 
Sometimes the revolver shots drowned the voices of 
Garthwaite and the officer, and they were compelled 
to repeat what they had been saying. 

I lived through three days of the Chicago Commune, 
and the vastness of it and of the slaughter may be im 
agined when I say that in all that time I saw practically 
nothing outside the killing of the people of the abyss 
and the mid-air fighting between sky-scrapers. I really 
saw nothing of the heroic work done by the comrades. 
I could hear the explosions of their mines and bombs, 
and see the smoke of their conflagrations, and that was 
all. The mid-air part of one great deed I saw, however, 
and that was the balloon attacks made by our com- 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 335 

rades on the fortresses. That was on the second day. 
The three disloyal regiments had been destroyed in 
the fortresses to the last man. The fortresses were 
crowded with Mercenaries, the wind blew in the right 
direction, and up went our balloons from one of the 
office buildings in the city. &gt;&gt; 

Now Biedenbach, after he left Glen Ellen, had in 
vented a most powerful explosive " expedite" he 
called it. This was the weapon the balloons used. They 
were Only hot-air balloons, clumsily and hastily made, 
but they did the work. I saw it all from the top of an 
office building. The first balloon missed the fortresses 
completely and disappeared into the country; but we 
learned about it afterward. Burton and O Sullivan 
were in it. As they were descending they swept across 
a railroad directly over a troop-train that was heading 
at full speed for Chicago. They dropped their whole 
supply of expedite upon the locomotive. The result 
ing wreck tied the line up for days. And the best 
of it was that, released from the weight of expedite, 
the balloon shot up into the air and did not come down 
for half a dozen miles, both heroes escaping unharmed. 

The second balloon was a failure. Its flight was lame. 
It floated too low and was shot full of holes before it 
could reach the fortresses. Herford and Guinness were 
in it, and they were blown to pieces along with the 
field into which they fell. Biedenbach was in despair 
we heard all about it afterward and he went up alone 



336 THE IRON HEEL 

in the third balloon. He, too, made a low flight, but 
he was in luck, for they failed seriously to puncture his 
balloon. I can see it now as I did then, from the lofty 
top of the building that inflated bag drifting along 
the air, and that tiny speck of a man clinging on be 
neath. I could not see the fortress, but those on the 
roof with me said he was directly over it. I did not 
see the expedite fall when he cut it loose. But I did 
see the balloon suddenly leap up into the sky. An 
appreciable time after that the great column of the 
explosion towered in the air, and after that, in turn, I 
heard the roar of it. Biedenbach the gentle had de 
stroyed a fortress. Two other balloons followed at the 
same time. One was blown to pieces in the air, the 
expedite exploding, and the shock of it disrupted the 
second balloon, which fell prettily into the remaining 
fortress. It couldn t have been better planned, though 
the two comrades in it sacrificed their lives. 

But to return to the people of the abyss. My ex 
periences were confined to them. They raged and 
slaughtered and destroyed all over the city proper, 
and were in turn destroyed; but never once did they 
succeed in reaching the city of the oligarchs over on 
the west side. The oligarchs had protected themselves 
well. No matter what destruction was wreaked in the 
heart of the city, they, and their womenkind and chil 
dren, were to escape hurt. I am told that their chil 
dren played in the parks during those terrible days and 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 337 

that their favorite game was an imitation of their elders 
stamping upon the proletariat. 

But the Mercenaries found it no easy task to cope 
with the people of the abyss and at the same time fight 
with the comrades. Chicago was true to her tradi 
tions, and though a generation of revolutionists was 
wiped out, it took along with it pretty close to a gen 
eration of its enemies. Of course, the Iron Heel kept 
the figures secret, but, at a very conservative estimate, 
at least one hundred and thirty thousand Mercenaries 
were slain. But the comrades had no chance. Instead 
of the whole country being hand in hand in revolt, they 
were all alone, and the total strength of the Oligarchy 
could have been directed against them if necessary. 
As it was, hour after hour, day after day, in endless 
train-loads, by hundreds of thousands, the Mercenaries 
were hurled into Chicago. 

And there were so many of the people of the abyss I 
Tiring of the slaughter, a great herding movement was 
begun by the soldiers, the intent of which was to drive 
the street mobs, like cattle, into Lake Michigan. It 
was at the beginning of this movement that Garthwaite 
and I had encountered the young officer. This herd 
ing movement was practically a failure, thanks to the 
splendid work of the comrades. Instead of the great 
host the Mercenaries had hoped to gather together, they 
succeeded in driving no more than forty thousand of 
the wretches into the lake. Time and again, when a 



338 THE IRON HEEL 

mob of them was well in hand and being driven along 
the streets to the water, the comrades would create a 
diversion, and the mob would escape through the 
consequent hole torn in the encircling net. 

Garthwaite and I saw an example of this shortly 
after meeting with the young officer. The mob of 
which we had been a part, and which had been put in 
retreat, was prevented from escaping to the south and 
east by strong bodies of troops. The troops we had 
fallen in with had held it back on the west. The only 
outlet was north, and north it went toward the lake, 
driven on from east and west and south by machine-gun 
fire and automatics. Whether it divined that it was 
being driven toward the lake, or whether it was merely 
a blind squirm of the monster, I do not know ; but at 
any rate the mob took a cross street to the west, turned 
down the next street, and came back upon its track, 
heading south toward the great ghetto. 

Garthwaite and I at that time were trying to make 
our way westward to get out of the territory of street- 
fighting, and we were caught right in the thick of it 
again. As we came to the corner we saw the howling 
mob bearing down upon us. Garthwaite seized my 
arm and we were just starting to run, when he dragged 
me back from in front of the wheels of half a dozen war 
automobiles, equipped with machine-guns, that were 
rushing for the spot. Behind them came the soldiers 
with their automatic rifles. By the time they took 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 339 

position, the mob was upon them, and it looked as 
though they would be overwhelmed before they could 
get into action. 

Here and there a soldier was discharging his rifle, 
but this scattered fire had no effect in checking the mob. 
On it came, bellowing with brute rage. It seemed the 
machine-guns could not get started. The automobiles 
on which they were mounted blocked the street, com 
pelling the soldiers to find positions in, between, and on 
the sidewalks. More and more soldiers were arriving, 
and in the jam we were unable to get away. Garth- 
waite held me by the arm, and we pressed close against 
the front of a building. 

The mob was no more than twenty-five feet away 
when the machine-guns opened up ; but before that 
flaming sheet of death nothing could live. The mob 
came on, but it could not advance. It piled up in a 
heap, a mound, a huge and growing wave of dead and 
dying. Those behind urged on, and the column, from 
gutter to gutter, telescoped upon itself. Wounded 
creatures, men and women, were vomited over the top 
of that awful wave and fell squirming down the face 
of it till they threshed about under the automobiles 
and against the legs of the soldiers. The latter bayo 
neted the struggling wretches, though one I saw who 
gained his feet and flew at a soldier s throat with his 
teeth. Together they went down, soldier and slave, 
into the welter. 



340 THE IRON HEEL 

The firing ceased. The work was done. The mob 
had been stopped in its wild attempt to break through. 
Orders were being given to clear the wheels of the war- 
machines. They could not advance over that wave of 
dead, and the idea was to run them down the cross 
street. The soldiers were dragging the bodies away 
from the wheels when it happened. We learned after 
ward how it happened. A block distant a hundred of 
our comrades had been holding a building. Across 
roofs and through buildings they made their way, till 
they found themselves looking down upon the close- 
packed soldiers. Then it was counter-massacre. 

Without warning, a shower of bombs fell from the 
top of the building. The automobiles were blown to 
fragments, along with many soldiers. We, with the 
survivors, swept back in mad retreat. Half a block 
down another building opened fire on us. As the sol 
diers had carpeted the street with dead slaves, so, in 
turn, did they themselves become carpet. Garthwaite 
and I bore charmed lives. As we had done before, 
so again we sought shelter in an entrance. But he 
was not to be caught napping this time. As the roar 
of the bombs died away, he began peering out. 

"The mob s coming back!" he called to me. 
"We ve got to get out of this !" 

We fled, hand in hand, down the bloody pavement, 
slipping and sliding, and making for the corner. Down 
the cross street we could see a few soldiers still running. 



THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS 341 

Nothing was happening to them. The way was clear. 
So we paused a moment and looked back. The mob 
came on slowly. It was busy arming itself with the 
rifles of the slain and killing the wounded. We saw 
the end of the young officer who had rescued us. He 
painfully lifted himself on his elbow and turned loose 
with his automatic pistol. 

"There goes my chance of promotion," Garthwaite 
laughed, as a woman bore down on the wounded man, 
brandishing a butcher s cleaver. "Come on. It s 
the wrong direction, but we ll get out somehow." 

And we fled eastward through the quiet streets, pre* 
pared at every cross street for anything to happen. To 
the south a monster conflagration was filling the sky, 
and we knew that the great ghetto was burning. At 
last I sank down on the sidewalk. I was exhausted 
and could go no farther. I was bruised and sore and 
aching in every limb ; yet I could not escape smiling at 
Garthwaite, who was rolling a cigarette and saying: 

"I know I m making a mess of rescuing you, but I 
can t get head nor tail of the situation. It s all a mess. 
Every time we try to break out, something happens and 
we re turned back. We re only a couple of blocks now 
from where I got you out of that entrance. Friend and 
foe are all mixed up. It s chaos. You can t tell who 
is in those darned buildings. Try to find out, and you 
get a bomb on your head. Try to go peaceably on your 
way, and you run into a mob and are killed by machine- 



342 THE IRON HEEL 

guns, or you run into the Mercenaries and are killed 
by your own comrades from, a roof. And on the top 
of it all the mob comes along and kills you, too." 

He shook his head dolefully, lighted his cigarette, 
and sat down beside me. 

"And I m that hungry," he added, "I could eat cob 
blestones." 

The next moment he was on his feet again and out 
in the street prying up a cobblestone. He came back 
with it and assaulted the window of a store behind us. 

"It s ground floor and no good," he explained as he 
helped me through the hole he had made; "but it s 
the best we can do. You get a nap and I ll reconnoitre. 
I ll finish this rescue all right, but I want time, time, 
lots of it and something to eat." 

It was a harness store we found ourselves in, and he 
fixed me up a couch of horse blankets in the private 
office well to the rear. To add to my wretchedness a 
splitting headache was coming on, and I was only too 
glad to close my eyes and try to sleep. 

"I ll be back," were his parting words. "I don t 
hope to get an auto, but I ll surely bring some grub, 1 
anyway." 

And that was the last I saw of Garthwaite for three 
years. Instead of coming back, he was carried away 
to a hospital with a bullet through his lungs and another 
through the fleshy part of his neck. 



CHAPTER XXIV 

NIGHTMARE 

I HAD not closed my eyes the night before on ther 
Twentieth Century, and what of that and of my ex 
haustion I slept soundly. When I first awoke, it was 
night. Garthwaite had not returned. I had lost my 
watch and had no idea of the time. As I lay with my 
eyes closed, I heard the same dull sound of distant ex 
plosions. The inferno was still raging. I crept through 
the store to the front. The reflection from the sky 
of vast conflagrations made the street almost as light 
as day. One could have read the finest print with ease. 
From several blocks away came the crackle of small 
hand-bombs and the churning of machine-guns, and 
from a long way off came a long series of heavy explo 
sions. I crept back to my horse blankets and slept 
again. 

When next I awoke, a sickly yellow light was filtering 
in on me. It was dawn of the second day. I crept 
to the front of the store. A smoke pall, shot through 
with lurid gleams, filled the sky. Down the opposite 

343 



344 THE IRON HEEL 

side of the street tottered a wretched slave. One hand 
he held tightly against his side, and behind him he left 
a bloody trail. His eyes roved everywhere, and they 
were filled with apprehension and dread. Once he 
looked straight across at me, and in his face was all the 
dumb pathos of the wounded and hunted animal. He 
saw me, but there was no kinship between us, and with 
jhim, at least, no sympathy of understanding ; for he 
cowered perceptibly and dragged himself on. He could 
expect no aid in all God s world. He was a helot in 
the great hunt of helots that the masters were making. 
All he could hope for, all he sought, was some hole to 
crawl away in and hide like any animal. The sharp 
clang of a passing ambulance at the corner gave him a 
start. Ambulances were not for such as he. With 
a groan of pain he threw himself into a doorway. A 
minute later he was out again and desperately hobbling 
on. 

I went back to my horse blankets and waited an hour 
for Garthwaite. My headache had not gone away. 
On the contrary, it was increasing. It was by an effort 
of will only that I was able to open my eyes and look 
at objects. And with the opening of my eyes and the 
looking came intolerable torment. Also, a great pulse 
was beating in my brain. Weak and reeling, I went 
out through the broken window and down the street, 
seeking to escape, instinctively and gropingly, from 
the awful shambles. And thereafter I lived nightmare. 



NIGHTMARE 345 

My memory of what happened in the succeeding hours 
is the memory one would have of nightmare. Many 
events are fo cussed sharply on my brain, but between 
these indelible pictures I retain are intervals of uncon 
sciousness. What occurred in those intervals I know 
not, and never shall know. 

I remember stumbling at the corner over the legs of 
a man. It was the poor hunted wretch that had 
dragged himself past my hiding-place. How distinctly 
do I remember his poor, pitiful, gnarled hands as he lay 
there on the pavement hands that were more hoof and 
claw than hands, all twisted and distorted by the toil 
of all his days, with on the palms a horny growth 
of callous a half inch thick. And as I picked myself 
up and started on, I looked into the face of the thing 
and saw that it still lived ; for the eyes, dimly intelli 
gent, were looking at me and seeing me. 

After that came a kindly blank. I knew nothing, 
saw nothing, merely tottered on in my quest for safety. 
My next nightmare vision was a quiet street of the 
dead. I came upon it abruptly, as a wanderer in the 
country would come upon a flowing stream. Only this 
stream I gazed upon did not flow. It was congealed 
in death. From pavement to pavement, and covering 
the sidewalks, it lay there, spread out quite evenly, 
with only here and there a lump or mound of bodies 
to break the surface. Poor driven people of the abyss, 
hunted helots they lay there as the rabbits in Cali- 



346 THE IRON HEEL 

fornia after a drive. 1 Up the street and down I looked. 
There was no movement, no sound. The quiet build 
ings looked down upon the scene from their many win 
dows. And once, and once only, I saw an arm that 
moved in that dead stream. I swear I saw it move, 
with a strange writhing gesture of agony, and with it 
lifted a head, gory with nameless horror, that gibbered 
at me and then lay down again and moved no more. 
I remember another street, with quiet buildings on 
either side, and the panic that smote me into conscious 
ness as again I saw the people of the abyss, but this time 
in a stream that flowed and came on. And then I saw 
there was nothing to fear. The stream moved slowly, 
while from it arose groans and lamentations, cursings, 
babblings of senility, hysteria, and insanity ; for these 
were the very young and the very old, the feeble and the 
sick, the helpless and the hopeless, all the wreckage 
of the ghetto. The burning of the great ghetto on the 
South Side had driven them forth into the inferno of 
the street-fighting, and whither they wended and what- 
ever became of them I did not know and never learned. 2 

1 In those days, so sparsely populated was the land that wild ani 
mals often became pests. In California the custom of rabbit-driving 
obtained. On a given day all the farmers in a locality would assemble 
and sweep across the country in converging lines, driving the rabbits 
by scores of thousands into a prepared enclosure, where they were 
clubbed to death by men and boys. 

2 It was long a question of debate, whether the burning of the South 
Side ghetto was accidental, or whether it was done by the Mercenaries; 
but it is definitely settled now that the ghetto was fired by the Mer 
cenaries under orders from their chiefs. 



NIGHTMARE 347 

I have faint memories of breaking a window and 
hiding in some shop to escape a street mob that was 
pursued by soldiers. Also, a bomb burst near me, 
once, in some still street, where, look as I would, up 
and down, I could see no human being. But my next 
sharp recollection begins with the crack of a rifle and an 
abrupt becoming aware that I am being fired at by a 
soldier in an automobile. The shot missed, and the 
next moment I was screaming and motioning the sig 
nals. "My memory of riding in the automobile is very 
hazy, though this ride, in turn, is broken by one vivid 
picture. The crack of the rifle of the soldier sitting 
beside me made me open my eyes, and I saw George 
Milford, whom I had known in the Pell Street days, 
sinking slowly down to the sidewalk. Even as he sank 
the soldier fired again, and Milford doubled in, then 
flung his body out, and fell sprawling. The soldier 
chuckled, and the automobile sped on. 

The next I knew after that I was awakened out of 
a sound sleep by a man who walked up and down close 
beside me. His face was drawn and strained, and the 
sweat rolled down his nose from his forehead. One 
hand was clutched tightly against his chest by the 
other hand, and blood dripped down upon the floor as 
he walked. He wore the uniform of the Mercenaries. 
From without, as through thick walls, came the muffled 
roar of bursting bombs. I was in some building that 
was locked in combat with some other building. 



348 THE IRON HEEL 

A surgeon came in to dress the wounded soldier, and 
I learned that it was two in the afternoon. My head 
ache was no better, and the surgeon paused from his 
work long enough to give me a powerful drug that would 
depress the heart and bring relief. I slept again, and 
the next I knew I was on top of the building. The 
immediate fighting had ceased, and I was watching the 
balloon attack on the fortresses. Some one had an 
arm around me and I was leaning close against him. 
It came to me quite as a matter of course that this waa 
Ernest, and I found myself wondering how he had got 
his hair and eyebrows so badly singed. 

It was by the merest chance that we had found each 
other in that terrible city. He had had no idea that 
I had left New York, and, coming through the room 
where I lay asleep, could not at first believe that it was 
I. Little more I saw of the Chicago Commune. After 
watching the balloon attack, Ernest took me down 
into the heart of the building, where I slept the after 
noon out and the night. The third day we spent in the 
building, and on the fourth, Ernest having got per 
mission and an automobile from the authorities, we 
left Chicago. 

My headache was gone, but, body and soul, I was very 
tired. I lay back against Ernest in the automobile, 
and with apathetic eyes watched the soldiers trying 
to get the machine out of the city. Fighting was still 
going on, but only in isolated localities. Here and 



NIGHTMARE 349 

there whole districts were still in possession of the com 
rades, but such districts were surrounded and guarded 
by heavy bodies of troops. In a hundred segregated 
traps were the comrades thus held while the work of 
subjugating them went on. Subjugation meant death, 
for no quarter was given, and they fought heroically 
to the last man. 1 

Whenever we approached such localities, the guards 
turned us back and sent us around. Once, the only 
way past two strong positions of the comrades was 
through a burnt section that lay between. From either 
side we could hear the rattle and roar of war, while the 
automobile picked its way through smoking ruins and 
tottering walls. Often the streets were blocked by 
mountains of debris that compelled us to go around. 
We were in a labyrinth of ruin, and our progress was 
slow. 

The stockyards (ghetto, plant, and everything) were 
smouldering ruins. Far off to the right a wide smoke 
haze dimmed the sky, the town of Pullman, the sol 
dier chauffeur told us, or what had been the town of 
Pullman, for it was utterly destroyed. He had driven 

1 Numbers of the buildings held out over a week, while one held 
out eleven days, Each building had to be stormed like a fort, and the 
Mercenaries fought their way upward floor by floor. It was deadly 
fighting. Quarter was neither given nor taken, and in the fighting 
the revolutionists had the advantage of being above. While the revo 
lutionists were wiped out, the loss was not one-sided. The proud 
Chicago proletariat lived up to its ancient boast. For as many of itself 
as were killed, it killed that many of the enemy. 



350 THE IRON HEEL 

the machine out there, with despatches, on the after 
noon of the third day. Some of the heaviest fighting 
had occurred there, he said, many of the streets being 
rendered impassable by the heaps of the dead. 

Swinging around the shattered walls of a building, 
in the stockyards district, the automobile was stopped 
by a wave of dead. It was for all the world like a 
wave tossed up by the sea. It was patent to us what 
had happened. As the mob charged past the corner, 
it had been swept, at right angles and point-blank 
range, by the machine-guns drawn up on the cross 
street. But disaster had come to the soldiers. A 
chance bomb must have exploded among them, for 
the mob, checked until its dead and dying formed the 
wave, had white-capped and flung forward its foam 
of living, fighting slaves. Soldiers and slaves lay to 
gether, torn and mangled, around and over the wreck 
age of the automobiles and guns. 

Ernest sprang out. A familiar pair of shoulders in 
a cotton shirt and a familiar fringe of w r hite hair had 
caught his eye. I did not watch him, and it was not 
until he was back beside me and we were speeding 
on that he said : 

"It was Bishop Mo rehouse." 

Soon we were in the green country, and I took one 
last glance back at the smoke-filled sky. Faint and 
far came the low thud of an explosion. Then I turned 
my face against Ernest s breast and wept softly for 



NIGHTMARE 351 

the Cause that was lost. Ernest s arm about me was 
eloquent with love. 

"For this time lost, dear heart," he said, "but not 
forever. We have learned. To-morrow the Cause will 
rise again, strong with wisdom and discipline." 

The automobile drew up at a railroad station. Here 
we would catch a train to New York. As we waited 
on the platform, three trains thundered past, bound 
west to Chicago. They were crowded with ragged, 
unskilled laborers, people of the abyss. 

"Slave-levies for the rebuilding of Chicago," Ernest 
said. "You see, the Chicago slaves are all killed." 



CHAPTER XXV 

THE TERRORISTS 

IT was not until Ernest and I were back in New York, 
and after weeks had elapsed, that we were able to 
comprehend thoroughly the full sweep of the disaster 
that had befallen the Cause. The situation was bitter 
and bloody. In many places, scattered over the coun 
try, slave revolts and massacres had occurred. The roll 
of the martyrs increased mightily. Countless execu 
tions took place everywhere. The mountains and waste 
regions were filled with outlaws and refugees who were . 
being hunted down mercilessly. Our own refuges* 
were packed with comrades who had prices on their 
heads. Through information furnished by its spies, 
scores of our refuges were raided by the soldiers of the 
Iron Heel. 

Many of the comrades were disheartened, and they 
retaliated with terroristic tactics. The set-back to 
their hopes made them despairing and desperate. 
Many terrorist organizations unaffiliated with ua 

352 



THE TERRORISTS 353 

sprang into existence and caused us much trouble. 1 
These misguided people sacrificed their own lives 
wantonly, very often made our own plans go astray, 
and retarded our organization. 

And through it all moved the Iron Heel, impassive 
and deliberate, shaking up the whole fabric of the social 
structure in its search for the comrades, combing out 
the Mercenaries, the labor castes, and all its secret 
services, punishing without mercy and without malice, 
suffering in silence all retaliations that were made upon 
it, and filling the gaps in its fighting line as fast as they 
appeared. And hand in hand with this, Ernest and 
the other leaders were hard at work reorganizing the 

1 The annals of this short-lived era of despair make bloody reading. 
Revenge was the ruling motive, and the members of the terroristic 
organizations were careless of their own lives and hopeless about the 
future. The Danites, taking their name from the avenging angels of 
the Mormon mythology, sprang up in the mountains of the Great 
West and spread over the Pacific Coast from Panama to Alaska. 
The Valkyries were women. They were the most terrible of all. No 
woman was eligible for membership who had not lost near relatives 
at the hands of the Oligarchy. They were guilty of torturing their 
prisoners to death. Another famous organization of women was The 
Widows of War. A companion organization to the Valkyries was the 
Berserkers. These men placed no value whatever upon their own 
lives, and it was they who totally destroyed the great Mercenary 
city of Bellona along with its population of over a hundred thousand 
souls. The Bedlamites and the Helldamites were twin slave organiza 
tions, while a new religious sect that did not flourish long was called 
The Wrath of God. Among others, to show the whimsicality of their 
deadly seriousness, may be mentioned the following: The Bleeding 
Hearts, Sons of the Morning, the Morning Stars, The Flamingoes, 
The Triple Triangles, The Three Bars, The Kubonics, The Vindicators, 
The Comanches. and The Erebusites. 

2A 



354 THE IRON HEEL 

forces of the Revolution. The magnitude of the task 
may be understood when it is taken into l 

1 This is the end of the Everhard Manuscript. It breaks off 
abruptly in the middle of a sentence. She must have received warning 
of the coming of the Mercenaries, for she had time safely to hide the 
Manuscript before she fled or was captured. It is to be regretted that 
she did not live to complete her narrative, for then, undoubtedly, 
would have been cleared away the mystery that has shrouded for 
seven centuries the execution of Ernest Everhard. 



Printed in the United Statee of America. 



ZANE GREY S NOVELS 

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Brosset t Dunlap s list 
THE LIGHT OF WESTERN STARS 

A New York society girl buys a ranch which becomes the center of frontier war 
fare. Her loyal superintendent rescues her when she is captured by bandits. A 
surprising climax brings the story to a delightful close. 

THE RAINBOW TRAIL 

The story of a young- clergyman who becomes a wanderer in the treat western 
uplands until at last love and faith awake. 

DESERT GOLD 

The story describes the recent uprising: alongf the border, and ends with the findimg 
of the gold which two prospectors had willed to the girl who is the story s heroine. 

RIDERS OF THE PURPLE SAGE 

A picturesque romance of Utah of tome forty years ago when Mormon authority 
ruled. The prosecution of Jane Withersteen is the themeof the story. 

THE LAST OF THE PLAINSMEN 

This is the record of a trip which the author took with Buffalo Jones, known as tha 
preserver of the American bison, across the Arizona desert and of a hunt in "that 
wonderful country of deep canons and giant pines." 

THE HERITAGE OF THE DESERT 

A lovely girl, who has been reared among* Mormons, learns to love a young New 
Englander. The Mormon religion, however, demands that the girl shall becoina 
the sscond wife of one of the Mormons Well, that s the problem of this great story. 

THE SHORT STOP 

The young hero, tiring of his factory grind, starts out to win fame and fortune as 
a professional ball player. His hard knocks at the start are followed by such success 
as clean sportsmanship, courage and honesty ought to win. 

BETTY ZANE 

This story tells of the bravery and heroism of Betty, the beautiful young: sister ! 
old Colonel Zane, one of the bravest pioneers. 

THE LONE STAR RANGER 

After killing a man in self defense, Buck Duane becomes an outlaw along th 
Texas border. In a camp on the Mexican side of the river, he finds a young girl held 
prisoner, and in attempting to rescue her, brings down upon himself the wrath of her 
captors and henceforth is hunted on one side by honest men, on the other by outlaws. 

THE BORDER LEGION 

Joan Randle, in a spirit of anger, sent Jim Cleve out to a lawless Wester* mining 
camp, to prove his mettle. Then realizing that she loved him she followed him out. 
On her way, she is captured by a bandit band, and trouble begins when she shoots 
Kells, the leader and nurses him to health again. Here enters another romance 
when Joan, disguised as an outlaw, observes Jim, in the throes of dissipation. A gold 
strike, a thrilling robbery gambling and gun play carry you along breathlessly. 

THE LAST OF THE GREAT SCOUTS, 

By Helen Cody Wetmore and Zane Grey 

The life story of Colonel William F. Cody, " Buffalo Bill," as told by his sister and 
Zane Grey. It begins with his boyhood in Iowa and his first encounter with an In 
dian. We see " Bill" as a pony express rider, then near Fort Sumter as Chief of 
the Scouts, and later engaged in the most dangerous Indian campaisjns. There is 
also a very interesting: account of the travels of "The Wild West" Show. No char 
acter In public life makes a stronger appeal to the imagination of America than 
" Buffalo Bill," whose daring and bravery made him famous. 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK 



THE NOVELS OF 

WINSTON CHURCHILL 

THE INSIDE OF THE CUP. Illustrated by Howard Giles. 

The Reverend John Hodder is called to a fashionable church in 
a middle- western city. He knows little of modern problems and in 
his theology is as orthodox as the rich men who control his church 
could desire. But the facts of modern life are thrust upon him; an 
awakening follows and in the end he works out a solution. 
A FAR COUNTRY. Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer. 



This novel is concerned with big problems of the day. As 
Inside of the Cup gets down to the essentials in its discussion of re 
ligion, so A Far Country deals in a story that is intense and dra 
matic, with other vital issues confronting the twentieth century. 
A MODERN CHRONICLE. Illustrated by J. H. Gardner Soper. 

This, Mr. Churchill s first great presentation of the Eternal 
Feminine, is throughout a profound study of a fascinating young 
American woman. It is frankly a modern love story. 
MR. CREWE S CAREER. Illus. by A. I. Keller and Kinneys. 

A new England state is under the political domination of a rail 
way and Mr. Crewe, a millionaire, seizes a moment when the cause 
of the people is being espoused by an ardent young attorney, to fur 
ther his own interest in a political way. The daughter of the rail- 
way president plays no small part in the situation. 
THE CROSSING. Illustrated by S. Adamson and L. Baylis. 

Describing the battle of Fort Moultrie, the blazing of the Ken 
tucky wilderness, the expedition of Clark and his handful of follow 
ers in Illinois, the beginning of civilization along the Ohio and 
Mississippi, and the treasonable schemes against Washington. 
CONISTON. Illustrated by Florence Scovel Shinn. 

A deft blending of love and politics. A New Englander is tho 
hero, a crude man who rose to political prominence by his own pow 
ers, and then surrendered all for the love of a woman. 
THE CELEBRITY. An episode. 

An inimitable bit of comedy describing an interchange of per 
sonalities between a celebrated author and a bicycle salesman. It 
is the purest, keenest fun and is American to the core. 

i FHE CRISIS. Illustrated with scenes from the Photo-Play. 

A book that presents the great crisis in our national life witn 
splendid power and with a sympathy, a sincerity, and a patriotism 
that are inspiring. 
RICHARD CARVEL. Illustrated by Malcolm Frazer. 

An historical novel which gives a real and vivid picture of Co 
lonial times, and is good, clean, spirited reading in all its phases and. 
interesting throughout. 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK 



JOHN FOX, JR S. 

STORIES OF THE KENTUCKY MOUNTAINS 

May be had whsrever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap s list 

THE TRAIL OF THE LONESOME PINE. 
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. 



The "lonesome pine" from which the 
story takes its name was a tall tree thai 
stood in solitary splendor on a mountain 
top. The fame of the pine lured a young 
engineer through Kentucky to catch the 
trail, and when he finally climbed to iti 
shelter he found not only the pine but the 
foot-prints of a girl. And the girl proved 
to be lovely, piquant, and the trail of 
these girlish foot-prints led the young; 
engineer a madder chase than "the trail 
of the lonesome pine." 

SHEPHERD OF KINGDOM COME 




THE LITTLE 



Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. 

This is a story of Kentucky, in a settlement known as "King 
dom Come." It is a life rude, semi-barbarous; but natural 
and honest, from which often springs the flower of civilization. 

" Chad." the "little shepherd" did not know who he was nor 
whence he came he had just wandered from door to door since 
early childhood, seeking shelter with kindly mountaineers who 
gladly fathered and mothered this waif about whom there was 
such a mystery a charming waif, by the way, who could play 
the banjo better that anyone else in the mountains. 

A KNIGHT OF THE CUMBERLAND./ 
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. 

The scenes are laid along the waters of the Cumberland* 
the lair of moonshiner and feudsman. The knight is a moon 
shiner s son, and the heroine a beautiful girl perversely chris 
tened "The Blight." Two impetuous young Southerners fall 
under the spell of "The Blight s " charms and she learns what 
a large part jealousy and pistols have in the love making of the 
mountaineers. 

Included in this volume is " Hell fer-Sartain" and other 
stories, some of Mr. Fox s most entertaining Cumberland valley 
narratives. 

1 Ask for complete fret list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted Fiction. 

LGROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK 




STORIES OF RARE CHARM BY 

GENE STRATTON-PORTER 

May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap s list 

LADDIE. 

Illustrated by Herman Pfeifer. 

This is a bright, cheery tale with tha 
scenes laid in Indiana. The story is told 
by Little Sister, the youngest member of 
a large family, but it is concerned not sc 
much with childish doings as with the love 
affairs of older members of the family. 
Chief among them is that of Laddie, the 
older brother whom Little Sister adores, 
and the Princess, an English girl who has 
come to live in the neighborhood and about 
whose family there hangs a mystery. 
There is a wedding midway in the book 
and a double wedding at the close. 
THE HARVESTER. Illustrated by W. L. Jacobs. 

"The Harvester," David Langston, is a man of the woods and 
fields, who draws his living from the prodigal hand of Mother 
Nature herself. If the book had nothing in it but the splendid figure 
of this man it would be notable. But when the Girl comes to his 
"Medicine Woods," and the Harvester s whole being realizes that 
this is the highest point of life which has come to him thens begins 
a romance of the rarest idyllic quality. 
FRECKLES. Decorations by E. Stetson Crawford. 

Freckles is a nameless waif when the tale opens, but the xray in 
which he takes hold of life; the nature friendships he forms in the 
great Limberlost Swamp; the manner in which everyone who meets 
him succumbs to the charm of his engaging personality; and his 
love-story with "The Angel" are full of real sentiment. 
A GIRL OF THE LIMBERLOST. 
Illustrated by Wladyslaw T. Brenda. 

The story of a girl of the Michigan woods; a buoyant, lovable 
type of the self-reliant American. Her philosophy is one of love and 
(Kindness towards all things; her hope is never dimmed. And by th 
gheer beauty of her soul, and the purity of her vision, she wins from 
barren and unpromising surroundings thost rewards of high courage. 
AT THE FOOT OF THE RAINBOW. 
Illustrations in colors by Oliver Kemp. 

The scene of this charming love story is laid in Central Indiana, 
The story is one of devoted friendship, and tender self-sacrificing 
love. The novel is brimful of the most beautiful word painting or 
nature, and its pathos and tender sentiment will endear it to all. 



GkOSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK 




MYRTLE REED S NOVELS 

May be bad whirtver boak* an Mid. Ack for Orowrt ft Dwkji * ttet 



LAVENDER AND OLD LACE. 

A charming story of a quaiat comer oi 
New England where bygone romance finds a. 
modern parallel. The story canters round 
the coming of IOT to tha yoaog people ool 
the Btaff of a newspaper and it is one of th* 
prettiest, sweetest and quaintest oi old fash 
ioned love stories, * * * a rare book, ex 
quisite in spirit and conception, full or 
delicate fancy, of tenderness, ot 
humor and spootaniety. 



A SPINNER IN THE SUN. 

Miss Myrtle Reed may always be depended upon to write a stotj 
la which poetry, charm, tenderness and humor arc combinad into a 
clever and entertaining book. Her characters ar delightful and she 
always displays a quaint humor of expression and a quiet f e*iing of 
pathos which give a touch of active realism to all her writings. In 
"A Spinner in the Sun" she tells an old-fashioned love story, of a 
veiled lady who lives in solitude and whose features her neighbors 
have never seen. There is a mystery at the heart of the book that 
throws over it the glamour of romance. 

THE MASTER S VIOLIN. 

A love story in a musical atmosphere. A picturesque, old Ger 
man virtuoso is the reverent possessor of a genuine "Cremona." H- 
consents to take for his pupil a handsome youth who proves to hav 
am aptitude for technique, but not the soul of an artist The yout n 
lias led the happy, careless life of a modem, well-to-do young Amer 
ican and he cannot, with his meagre past, express the love, thepassioa 
and the tragedies of life and all its happy phases as can the -naster 
who has lived life in all its fulness. But a girl comes into his life a. 
beautiful bit of human driftwood that his aunt had taken into her! 
heart ar&gt;d home, and through his passionate love for her., he learns 
tlie lessons that lif e has to give and his soul awakes. 

Founded on a fact that all artists realize. 

AsTt for a complete free )rst of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted, Fict on 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK 



B. M. Bower s Novels 

Thrilling Western Romances 

Large 12 mos. Handsomely bound in cloth. Illustrated 

CHIP, OF THE FLYING U 

A breezy wholesome tale, wherein the love affairs of Chip and 
Delia Whitman are charmingly and humorously told. Chip s 
jealousy of Dr. Cecil Grantham, who turns out to be a big. blue 
eyed young -woman is very amusing. A clever, realistic story of 
the American Cow-puncher. 

THE HAPPY FAMILY 

A lively and amusing story, dealing with the adventures of 
eighteen jovial, big hearted Montana cowboys. Foremost amongst 
them, we find Ananias Green, known as Andy, whose imaginative 
powers cause many lively and exciting adventures. 
HER PRAIRIE KNIGHT 

A realistic story of the plains, describing a gay party of Eas 
terners who exchange a cottage at Newport for the rough homeli 
ness of a Montana ranch -house. The merry-hearted cowboys, the 
fascinating Beatrice, and the effusive Sir Redmond, become living, 
breathing personalities. 
THE RANGE DWELLERS 

Here are everyday, genuine cowboys, just as they really exist. 
Spirited action, a range feud between two families, and a Romeo 
and Juliet courtship make this a bright, jolly, ^entertaining story, 
without a dull page. &lt;*&lt;* , &lt;~v&lt; , 

THE LURE OF DIM TRAILS 

A vivid portrayal of the experience of an Eastern author, 
among the cowboys of the West, in search of "local color" for a 
new novel. "Bud" Thurston leams many a lesson while following 
"the lure of the dim trails" but^the hardest, and probably the most 
welcome, is that of love. -"&gt;- -*"/ 
THE LONESOME TRAIL v 

"Weary" Davidson leaves the ranch for Portland, where con- 
ventional city life palls on him. A little branch of sage brush, 
pungent with the atmosphere of the prairie, and the recollection of 
a pair of large brown eyes soon compel his return. _ A wholesome 
love story, . , / 

THE LONG SHADOW, 

A vigorous Western story, sparkling with 7 ; the free, outdoor, 
life of a mountain ranch. Its scenes shift rapidly and its actors play 
the game of life fearlessly and like men. It is a fine love story from 
start to finish. 



Ask for a complete free list of G. & D. Popular Copyrighted. Fiction. 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26-ra ST., NEW YORK 



THE NOVELS OF 

STEWART EDWARD WHITE 



THE RULES OF THE GAME. Illustrated by Lajaren A. Hiller 

The romanca of theson of "The Riverman." The young college 
hero goes into the lumber camp, is antagonized by "graft" and comes 
into the romance of his life. 
ARIZONA NIGHTS. Illus. and cover inlay by N. C. Wyeth. 

A series of spirited tales emphasizing some phases of the life 
of the ranch, plains and desert. A masterpiece. 
THE BLAZED TRAIL. With illustiations by Thomas Fogarty. 

A wholesome story with gleams of humor, telling of a young 
man who blazed his way to fortune through the heart of the Mich- 
igan pines. 
THE CLAIM JUMPERS. A Romance. 

The tenderfoot manager of a mine in a lonesome gulch of th 
Black Hills has a hard time of it, but "wins out" in more ways than 
one. 
CONJUROR S HOUSE. Illustrated Theatrical Edition. 

Dramatized under the title of "The Call of the North." 

"Conjuror s House is a Hudson Bay trading post where the 
bead factor is the absolute lord. A young fellow risked his life and 
won a bride on this forbidden land. 
THE MAGIC FOREST. A Modern Fairy Tale. Illustrated. 

The sympathetic way in which the children of the wild and 
their life is treated could only belong to one who is in love with the 
forest and open air. Based on fact t . 
THE RIVERMAN. Illus. by N. C. Wyeth and C. Underwood. 

The story of a man s fight against a river and of a struggle 
between honesty and grit on the one side, and dishonesty and 
shrewdness on the other. 

THE SILENT PLACES. Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin. 

The wonders of the northern forests, the heights of feminine 
devotion, and masculine power, the intelligence of the Caucasian 
and the instinct of the Indian, are all finely drawn in this story. 
THE WESTERNERS. 

A story of the Black Hills that is justly placed among the 
best American novels. It portrays the life of the new West as no 
other book has done in recent years. 

THE MYSTERY. In collaboration with Samuel Hopkins Adams 
With illustrations by Will Crawford. 

The disappearance of three successive crews from the stout 
ship -Laughing Lass" in mid-Pacific, is a mystery weird and inscrut 
able. In the solution, there is a story of the most exciting vovage 
that man ever undertook. 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK 



GROSSET & DUNLAP S 

DRAMATIZED NOVELS 

Original, sincere and courageous often amusing the 
kind that are making theatrical history. 

MADAME X. By Alexandre Bisson and J. W. McCon- 
aughy. Illustrated with scenes from the play^ 
A beautiful Parisienne became an outcast because her hus 
band would not forgive an error of her youth. Her love for 
her son is the great final influence in her career. A tremen 
dous dramatic success. 

THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens. 

An unconventional English woman and an inscrutable 
stranger meet and love in an oasis of the Sahara. Staged 
this season with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties. 

THE PRINCE OF INDIA. By Lew. Wallace. 

A glowing romance of the Byzantine Empire, presenting 
with extraordinary power the siege of Constantinople, and 
lighting its tragedy with the warm underglow of an Oriental 
romance. As a play it is a great dramatic spectacle. 

TESS OF THE STORM COUNTRY. By Grace 
Miller White. Illust. by Howard Chandler Christy. 
A girl from the dregs of society, loves a young Cornell Uni 
versity student, and it works startling changes in her life and 
the lives of those about her. The dramatic version is one of 
the sensations of the season. 

YOUNG WALLINGFORD. By George Randolph 

Chester. Illust. by F. R. Gruger and Henry Raleigh. 

A series of clever swindles conducted by a cheerful young 

man, each of which is just on the safe side of a State s prison 

offence. As " Get-Rich-Quick Wallingford," it is probably 

the most amusing expose of money manipulation ever seen 

on the stage. 

THE INTRUSION OF JIMMY. By P. G. Wode- 

house. Illustrations by Will Grefe. 
Social and club life in London and New York, an amateur 
burglary adventure and a love story. Dramatized under the 
title of "A Gentleman of Leisure," it furnishes hours of 
laughter to the play-goers. 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST., NEW YORK 



GROSSET& DUNLAP S 

DRAMATIZED NOVELS 

THE KIND THAT ARE MAKING THEATRICAL HISTORY 
May be had wherever backs an said. Ask far Qrmet fc Dunlap s list 

WITHIN THE LAW. By Bayard Veffler & Marvin Dana. 
Illustrated by Wm. Charles Cooke. 

This is a novelization of the immensely successful play which ran 
for two years in New York and Chicago. 

The plot of this powerful novel is of a young woman s revenge 
directed against her employer who allowed her to be sent to prison 
for three years on a charge of theft, of which she was innocent. 

WHAT HAPPENED TO MARY. By Robert Carlton Brown, 
Illustrated with scenes from the play. 

This is a narrative of a young and innocent country girl who is 
suddenly thrown into the very heart of New York, "the land of her 
dreams, where she is exposed to all sorts of temptations and dangers. 

The story of Mary is being told in moving pictures and played ui 
theatres all over the world. 

THE RETURN OF PETER GRIMM. By David Belasco. 
Illustrated by John Rae, 

This is a novelization of the popular play in which David War, 
field, as Old Peter Grimm, scored such a remarkable success. 

Th story is spectacular and extremely pathetic but withal, 
powerful, both as a book and as a play. 
THE GARDEN OF ALLAH. By Robert Hichens.? 

This novel is an intense, glowing epic of the great desert, sunlit 
barbaric, with its marvelous atmosphere of vastness and loneliness, 

It is a book of rapturous beauty, vivid in word painting. The play 
has been staged with magnificent cast and gorgeous properties. 
BEN HUR. A Tale of the Christ. By General Lew Wallace. 

The whole world has placed this famous Religious-Historical Ro 
mance on a height of pre-eminence which no other novel of its time 
has reached. The clashing of rivalry and the deepest human passions, 
the perfect reproduction of brilliant Roman life, and the tense, fierce 
atmosphere of tha arena have kept their deep fascination. A tre 
mendous dramatic success. 

BOUGHT AftD PAID FOR. By George Broadhurst and Arthur 
Hornblow. Illustrated with scenes from the play. 

A stupendous arraignment of modern marriage which has created 
an interest on the stage that is almost unparalleled. The scenes are laid 
in New York, and deal with conditions among both the rich and poor. 

The interest of the story turns on the day-by-day developments 
which show the young wife the price she has paid. 

Ask for compete fret list of G. & D. Popular Coyrig1ied Fiction 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST.. NEW YORK. 



NOVELS 



May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for GrossPt & Duniap s list. 

JOHN BARLEYCORN. Illustrated by H. T. Dunn. 

This remarkable book is a record of the author s own amazing 
experiences. This big, brawny world rover, who has been ao- 
quainted with alcohol from boyhood, comes out boldly against John 
Barleycorn. It is a string of exciting adventures, yet it forcefully 
Conveys an unforgetable idea and makes a typical Jack London book, 

THE VALLEY OF THE MOON. Frontispiece by George Harper. 

The story opens in the city slums where Billy Roberts, teamster 
and ex-prize fighter, and Saxon Brown, laundry worker, meet and 
love and marry. They tramp from one end of California to the 
other, and in the Valley of the Moon find the farm paradise that is 
to be their salvation. 
BURNING DAYLIGHT. Four illustrations. 

The story of an adventurer who went to Alaska and laid the 
foundations of his fortune before the gold hunters arrived. Bringing 
his fortunes to the States he is cheated out of it by a crowd of money 
kings, and recovers it only at the muzzle of his gun. He then starts 
out as a merciless exploiter on his own account. Finally he takes to 
drinking and becomes a picture of degeneration. About this time 
he falls in love with his stenographer and wins her heart but not 
her hand and then but read the story! 
A SON OF THE SUN. Illustrated by A. O. Fischer and C.W. Ashley. 

David Grief was once a light-haired, blue-eyed youth who came 
from England to the South Seas in search of adventure. Tanned 
like a native and as lithe as a tiger, he became a real son of the sun. 
The life appealed to him and he remained and became very wealthy. 

THE CALL OF THE WILD. Illustrations by Philip R. Goodwin and 

Charles Livingston Bull. Decorations by Charles E. Hooper. 

A book ot dog adventures as exciting as any man s exploits 

could be. Here is excitement to stir the blood and here is pictius 

esque color to transport the reader to primitive scenes., 

THE SEA WOLF. Illustrated by W. J. Aylward. 

Told by a man whom Fate suddenly swings from his fastidious 
p f e into the power of the brutal captain of a sealing schooner. A 
Dovel of adventure warmed by a beautiful love episode that every 
reader will hail with delight. 
WHITE FANG. Illustrated by Charles Livingston Bull. 

"White Fang" is part dog, part wolf and all brute, living in the 
frozen north ; he gradually comes under the spell of man s com 
panionship, and surrenders all at the last in a fight with a bull dog. 
Thereafter he is man s loving slave. 



CHARMING BOOKS FOR GIRLS 

Hay ba had wherever becks are sold. Ask for Grosstt & Duiriap s list 

WHEN PATTY WENT TO COLLEGE, By Jean Webster. 
Illustrated by C. D. Williams. 

\ One of the best stories of life in a girl s college that has ever beer* 
written. It is bright, whimsical and entertaining, lifelike, laughabl* 
and thoroughly human. 

JUST PATTY, By Jean Webster. 

Illustrated by C. M. Relyea. 

Patty is full of the joy of living, fun-loving, given to Ingenious 
ttischief for its own sake, with a disregard for pretty convention which 
is an unfailing source of joy to her fellows. 

THE POOR LITTLE RICH GIRL, By Eleanor Gates. 

With four full page illustrations. 

This story relates the experience of one of those unfortunate chil 
lren whose early days are passed in the companionship of a governess, 
seldom seeing either parent, and famishing for natural love and tender- 
ness. A charming play as dramatized by the author. 

REBECCA OF PUNNYBROOK FARM, By Kate Douglas 
Wiggin, 

One of the most beautiful studies of childhood Rebecca s artistic, 
unusual and quaintly charming qualities stand out midst a circle of 
austere New Englanders. The stage version is making a phenominal 
dramatic record. 

KEW CHRONICLES OF REBECCA. By Kate Douglas Wiggin. 
Illustrated by F. C. Yohn. 

Additional episodes in the girlhood of this delightful heroine that 
carry Rebecca through various stages to her eighteenth birthday. 

REBECCA MARY, By Annie Hamilton Donnell. 

Illustrated by Elizabeth Shippen Green. 

This author possesses the rare gift of portraying all the grotesqns 
little joys and sorrows and scruples of this very small girl with a pa 
Jthos that is peculiarly genuine and appealing. 

EMMY LOU; Her Book and Heart, By George Madden Martin, 
Illustrated by Charles Louis Hinton. 

Emmy Lou is irresistibly lovable, because she is so absolutely real. 
She is just a bewitchingly innocent, hugable little maid. The book is 
wonderfully human. 

Ask for complete fret list of G. & D. Popular CoyrigTnd Fiction 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, 526 WEST 26th ST.. NEW YORK 



NOVELS OF FRONTIER LIFE BY 

WILLIAM MacLEOD RAINE 

HANDSOMELY BOUND IN CLOTH. ILLUSTRATED. 
May be had wherever books are sold. Ask for Grosset and Dunlap s list 

MAVERICKS. 

A tale of the western frontier, where the "rustler," whose dep. 
redations are so keenly resented by the early settlers of the range, 
abounds. One of the sweetest love stories ever told. 

A TEXAS RANGER. 

How a member of the most dauntless border police force carried 
law into the mesquit, saved the life of an innocent man after a series 
of thrilling adventures, followed a fugitive to Wyoming, and then 
passed through deadly peril to ultimate happiness. 

WYOMING. 

In this vivid story of the outdoor West the author has captured 
the breezy charm of "cattleland," and brings out the .urbid life of 
the frontier with all its engaging dash and vigor. 

RIDGWAY OF MONTANA. 

The scene is laid in the mining centers of Montana, where poli 
tics and mining industries are the religion of the country. The 
political contest, the love scene, and the fine chiiracter drawing give 
this story great strength and charm. 

BUCKY O CONNOR. 

Every chapter teems with wholesome, stirring adventures, re- 
plete with the dashing spirit of the border, told with dramatic dash 
and absorbing fascination of style and plot. 

CROOKED TRAILS AND STRAIGHT. 

A story of Arizona; of swift-riding men and daring outlaws; of 
p. bitter feud between cattle-men and sheep-herders. The heroine 
! fe a most unusual woman and her love story reaches a culmination 
that is fittingly characteristic of the great free West. 

BRAND BLOTTERS. 

A story of the Cattle Range. This story brings out the turbid 
life of the frontier, with all its engaging dash and vigor, with a charm 
ing love interest running through its 320 pages. 

GROSSET & DUNLAP, PUBLISHERS, NEW YORK 



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